The Evolution of Disease in a Rapidly Changing World

Joy Henry is a blogger for An Apple A Day and a writer specializing in online nursing degrees for Guide to Healthcare Schools.

As humans evolve and the world they live in changes, the types and prevalence of disease they get changes as well. And while both environment and genes can be responsible for different diseases, a new study is shedding light on the crossroads between them. New research out of Stanford Medical School shows that as humans’ environments change quickly and drastically (which often happens), genes can become selected which simultaneously make them more fit and more susceptible to a certain disease. The old Darwinian mantra of positive benefit, positive selection becomes complicated when environment changes at an unprecedented pace.

A landmark study – Effectiveness and Safety of Tenofovir Gel, an Antiretroviral Microbicide, for the Prevention of HIV Infection in Women

In what is being hailed as a landmark study, researchers running a trial in South Africa to test a vaginal microbicide with the antiretroviral (ARV) drug called tenofovir found that it significantly reduced women’s risk of becoming infected with HIV by 39 per cent compared with placebo.

Dr Quarraisha Abdool Karim and her husband Dr Salim S. Abdool Karim, announced the results of the CAPRISA 004 trial at the start of the International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010), which takes place in Vienna this week. They also co-authored a paper on the trial that was published online on 19 July in the journal Science.

The Abdool Karims split their time between CAPRISA (Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa) and the Mailman School of Public Health in Columbia University, New York.

The successful result has the potential to alter the course of the HIV epidemic and save millions of lives, Quarraisha Abdool Karim said at a news conference reported by WebMD.

Statistical Modeling for Biomedical Researchers – online resources and class notes

Blog Post by William D. Dupont, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

I teach a course in intermediate-level biostatistics as part of the Master of Public Health program at Vanderbilt University.  This program is targeted at clinical fellows who are interested in academic careers in population-based medicine.  Class notes for this course are posted at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/BiostatisticsTwoClassPage in both pdf and MS-PowerPoint formats.  This web site also contains the data files used in this course and log files illustrating the analyses performed in the lecture notes.  These notes are based on my text: Statistical Modeling for Biomedical Researchers.  The goal of both this text and these notes is to provide hands-on instruction in modern multi-variable statistical analysis while using a minimum of mathematics.  My web page for this text may be found at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/dupontwd/wddtext/.