Washington D.C: Overweight, obese children aren’t only prone to future health risks but their brain structure has been found to have differences in regions linked to cognitive control, compared to those with normal weight.

However, researchers stated that it was hard to say if obesity caused these changes or whether the children are obese because their brain structures are different, according to a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Previous studies have linked being overweight with scoring lower on various measures of executive function, an umbrella term for several functions such as self-control, decision making, working memory (temporarily holding information for processing) and response to rewards.

To examine if this link existed in children, researchers analysed data from 2,700 children between the ages of 9-11 years who had been recruited as part of the National Institutes of Health Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (NIH ABCD) Study.

They observed the thickness of the cortex, the outer layer of the brain – our so-called ‘grey matter’ – and compared it to each child’s body mass index (BMI) and also analysed results from tests of executive function.

An association between increased BMI and significant reductions in the average (mean) thickness of the cortex, as well as thinning in the pre-frontal region of the cortex, an area associated with cognitive control; was found.

This relationship remained after accounting for factors including age, sex, race, parental education, household income and birth-weight.

Researchers also found that increased BMI was associated with poorer performance at tests to measure executive function.

“We saw very clear differences in brain structure between children who were obese and children who were a healthy weight,” said study’s first author Dr Lisa Ronan from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s important to stress that the data does not show changes over time, so we cannot say whether being obese has changed the structure of these children’s brain or whether innate differences in their brains lead them to become obese,” Dr Ronan added.

When the team used waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio as a measure of obesity, they found that these, too, were associated with reduced executive function, but the link between cortical thickness was more complicated, with some regions showed reduced thickness while others showed increased thickness.

“The links that we observed suggest that there are very real structural brain and cognitive differences in children who are obese. The findings contribute a small part towards our growing understanding of the causes and consequences of obesity in children,” added Professor Paul Fletcher, also at Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry.

Researchers will continue following these children as they grow older to see whether structural differences in the brain change over time and exactly how they relate to obesity.

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Fifty years ago and four blocks away from Washington Square Park, the modern movement for gay rights caught fire. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, resistance to police brutality at the Stonewall Inn led to riots that would redefine LGBTQ Americans’ fight for civil rights.

To raise awareness of the Stonewall Riots on its 50-year anniversary, NYU has had a litany of programming that began last semester: on Thursday, this included the unveiling of nine panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Bobst Library.

The quilt commemorates lives lost during the AIDS crisis, among them activists, artists, writers, celebrities and NYU community members. Some squares are dedicated to individuals while others represent groups such as incarcerated women. The panels on display are a small section of the entire quilt, which consists of over 48,000 hand-made panels. 

In her opening night remarks, Tisch Arts professor and co-curator Karen Finley commented on the quilt’s historical significance. 

“[The quilt] brings up so much emotion […] the quilts are archives for so many that were lost at a time in American history when they were not given dignity or respect,” Finley said.

Finley and co-curator Marvin J. Taylor chose to highlight the quilt to help current students understand the pain experienced by previous generations of LGBTQ people.

“Students are young and don’t remember the trauma of AIDS. We would like younger people to understand that there was a time when the government didn’t care about AIDS,” Taylor said. “This battle nearly ended a whole generation, mostly due to neglect from the government. There’s still a very important role that the quilt plays; it has incredible totemic power when you see it. It’s heartbreaking and yet filled with love.”

Tisch first-year Skylar Kim was moved upon viewing the quilts in person for the first time after learning about the AIDS crisis in an LGBTQ history class.

“Actually looking at them is so touching and so special because each one was made with so much love and care,” Kim said. “You see the little pins and quotes and realize that these were real people.”

Taylor said the quilt is a monument for lost generation of LGBTQ people and a symbol of healing for those who lived through the crisis.

“These are the warriors who died for civil rights, for queer rights; [viewing The Quilt] is like visiting a military graveyard,” Taylor said. “They were venerated with art because they weren’t venerated in any other way.”

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is on display from Sept. 12 to Dec. 15 in the Mamdouha Bobst gallery, located on the ground floor atrium.

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Drugs work stunningly well to control HIV—but not in everyone, and not without side effects. That’s why a small cadre of patients known as elite controllers has long fascinated researchers: Their immune system alone naturally suppresses HIV for decades without drugs. Now one team, inspired by success in mice, hopes to endow HIV-infected people with tailormade immune cells that target HIV, in effect creating elite controllers in the clinic.

The immune strategy has risks, but it builds on increasingly popular cancer treatments with T cells engineered to have surface proteins, called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), that can recognize markers on the surfaces of tumor cells and destroy the cancer. Such CAR T cells can also be tailored to identify and eliminate HIV-infected cells. This approach was tested in HIV-infected humans long before CAR T cells proved their worth against cancer, but it roundly failed. The field wants “to move what’s been learned from cancer back to HIV, completing the circle,” says Steven Deeks, an HIV/AIDS clinician at the University of California, San Francisco, who first tested a CAR T cell against the virus in the late 1990s.

The new study—conducted by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania; the biotech company Lentigen in Gaithersburg, Maryland; and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City—uses a far more sophisticated CAR approach than the one Deeks tested. “It’s promising and seems to be more potent than what’s been tried in the past,” says stem cell biologist Hans-Peter Kiem, who has tested CAR T cells in leukemia and lymphoma patients at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.

For the new work, published online this week in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers engineered T cells to include genes encoding two kinds of CARs, each targeting a different part of HIV’s surface protein. In test tube studies, this “duoCAR T” cell powerfully killed white blood cells infected with a diverse array of HIV variants, the group reports.

The team also gave near simultaneous injections of CAR T cells and HIV-infected human cells to the spleens of mice with a “humanized” immune system. (Rodents cannot normally be infected with the AIDS virus.) When the group harvested spleens from the mice a week later, five of six mice had no detectable HIV DNA and their average viral levels had dropped 97.5%.

The group tested several other variations of CAR T cells in subsequent mouse studies to find the best combination of components. Its hope is that these CAR T cells could turn more people into elite controllers. Over time it might even cure them.

Immunovirologist Harris Goldstein of Albert Einstein, who conducted the mouse studies, says the duoCAR T cells promise to overcome a problem that hampered similar efforts in the past: The virus can easily change regions of its surface protein and dodge recognition by the engineered killer cells. By simultaneously binding to multiple regions on this protein, the dual receptor approach “makes it far more difficult for HIV to mutate around the binders,” Goldstein says.

In addition to putting genes for the CARs into the killer T cells—which are distinguished by the surface protein CD8—the researchers also modified CD4 T cells. CD4 cells, which regulate immune responses, are HIV’s favorite target, and their destruction is the hallmark of AIDS. The researchers found that the CD4 cells engineered to carry the CARs were highly resistant to HIV, probably because the CAR T binders disrupt the complicated infection process, in which HIV first connects to CD4 receptors and then attaches to a second receptor.

What works in a mouse or a test tube may not work in people, however, and CAR T cell treatment can be dangerous. “I’m not sure this is ready for patients without malignancies,” Kiem says. It requires toxic chemotherapy to kill some of a patient’s natural T cells to make “space” for the new ones to engraft. What’s more, in some cancer patients, CAR T cells have so supercharged the immune system that the treatment has destroyed organs.

Deeks hopes to run a small study of the new CAR T cells in HIV-infected people next year, using a minimal chemotherapy treatment beforehand. The study will enroll people who are controlling their infections with antiretrovirals, have them stop taking the drugs and see whether the infused CAR T cells can keep HIV suppressed. “CAR T cells are making massive advances in cancer, so there’s a huge rationale to expanding their use in the HIV cure effort,” Deeks says.

He acknowledges that the risks of CAR T cells may be less acceptable to HIV-infected people doing well on antiretrovirals than to cancer patients who have few other options. The upside is that if it works, they may be able to stop taking antiretrovirals for prolonged periods or perhaps forever—and they can always return to the drugs if it fails. Deeks is confident he’ll find people willing to take the gamble, if only to further research into a promising idea and help others living with the virus.

The post Can an immune strategy used to treat cancer also wipe out HIV infections? appeared first on MyMedicPlus.

I had never been to Washington, D.C., before April 2019, when alongside hundreds of other HIV activists, I stormed the Capitol for the 26th annual AIDSWatch, the nation’s largest annual HIV advocacy event.

AIDSWatch is organized by AIDS United, the Treatment Access Expansion Project (TAEP), and the United States People Living with HIV Caucus (HIV Caucus) and presented by The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. The event is an opportunity for people to march directly into congressional offices to share personal stories with our elected leaders about how HIV impacts our lives, to demand better access to care and treatment, and to educate them about the impeding efforts to end this epidemic. And you know what? It works.

Protecting our health care is up to us. We’ve always known that. Since the beginning of the AIDS crisis, it has been people living with HIV and those of us most at risk of becoming HIV-positive who have crowded the streets to demand government funding and research to end HIV. We’re continuing that fight today, but we’re no longer as alone as we once were.

Where once we had to beg for support from politicians, AIDSWatch has been changing that. And in the weeks following AIDSWatch, New York’s high-profile congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rallied other representatives to hold an oversight hearing surrounding rising costs of Truvada as PrEP.

There I was honored to bear witness to the initial meeting in which James Krellenstein and Nick Faust (activists at PrEP4All, the organization that spearheaded investigations into PrEP pricing), as well as other HIV activists from organizations like GMHC and Housing Works, sat down with Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff to discuss the lack of access to affordable treatment­ — not just for HIV meds, but for all drugs on the market.

After the hearings, Gilead agreed to give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention up to 2.4 million bottles of Truvada each year to go to uninsured Americans at risk for HIV. The agreement goes through 2029, and if the Food and Drug Administration approves it for this use, the agreement will extend to its newest drug, Descovy, which in recent studies proved as effective as Truvada when taken as PrEP.

The oversight hearing was just the first step in a very long journey to holding the pharmaceutical industry accountable for price inflation. For many of the legislators at the three-hour hearing, it was clearly the first time they’d spoken about HIV and PrEP. Rep. James Jordan from Ohio voiced a common confusion: “What’s the difference between PrEP and Truvada?”

PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, an HIV prevention protocol that relies on utilizing antiretroviral medication to prevent rather than treat HIV. Truvada was developed to treat HIV, but its almost miraculous nature as the first medication shown to prevent HIV when taken daily as PrEP (or even after sex as PEP, post-exposure prophylaxis) has been confirmed in numerous clinical trials. Although Truvada currently remains the only drug approved by the FDA for PrEP, others are in the pipeline (and Descovy will likely be approved this year or next).

For me, what was even more remarkable than witnessing Congress speak about HIV was seeing familiar faces of HIV activists from around the country. Among them were renowned HIV activists whose work has already changed the world, including Tami Haught, the champion of anticriminalization efforts, and Peter Staley, a member of ACT UP NY in the 1980s and ‘90s who founded Treatment Action Group and held politicians’ feet to the fire to fund HIV treatment research. Actions by activists like Haught, Staley, and thousands of others — many who unfortunately didn’t survive to see this day — ultimately led to the modern HIV treatment we have now, where living with HIV is manageable and HIV transmission can be prevented by a once-a-day pill.

Like all millennials, I’m not old enough to remember the early days of the AIDS crisis. Yet I’ve lived with the ghosts of a generation lost, as HIV stigma and AIDS phobia continue haunting gay and bi men. I’ve heard survival stories from those who live with HIV and related illnesses and those who suffered inconceivable losses. But I’m also lucky enough to have friends who teach me what being poz means in 2019 — when one can become undetectable within weeks of being diagnosed HIV-positive, where being virally suppressed means it’s virtually impossible to transmit HIV to anyone else. That stigma-busting truth gives me hope for the future when I think about how far we’ve come and the fight still ahead of us. If ever there is a time to come together, it is now.

Our health care is under attack by an administration that seems determined to undermine decades of progress. Throughout the world, and in our own country, people are dying not because appropriate medication doesn’t exist, but because they cannot access it (due to structural, systemic, or financial barriers).

History shows that liberation often starts with anger. It starts by shouting the truth so loud that our legislators can’t help but hear it.

The success of this year’s AIDSWatch and the subsequent congressional oversight hearings on drug pricing show our representatives are listening to the activists among us. Don’t stop now. Make your voice heard. This can be a turning point for America. Let’s come together and fight for access to care. Let’s seek rights that go beyond health insurance, but also include access to affordable medication.

Keep talking to your representatives. Keep them on their toes. When people die because they can’t afford their medication in one of the richest countries in the world, it makes me angry. It makes me want to fight. How about you?

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