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The HIV epidemic is rapidly growing among men who have sex with men (MSM) in China, yet HIV testing remains suboptimal. We aimed to determine the impact of HIV self-testing (HIVST) interventions on frequency of HIV testing among Chinese MSM and their sexual partners.

This randomized controlled trial was conducted in 4 cities in Hunan Province, China. Sexually active and HIV-negative MSM were recruited from communities and randomly assigned (11) to intervention or control arms. Participants in the control arm had access to site-based HIV testing (SBHT); those in the intervention arm were provided with 2 free finger-prick-based HIVST kits at enrollment and could receive 2 to 4 kits delivered through express mail every 3 months for 1 year in addition to SBHT. They were encouraged to distribute HIVST kits to their sexual partners. The primary outcome was the number of HIV tests taken by MSM participants, and the secondary outcome was the number of HIV tests taken by their sexual partners during 12 months of fly based on self-report by the participants, but self-reported number of HIVST in the intervention arm was validated; the number of partner HIV testing was indirectly reported by participants because of difficulties in accessing each of their partners.

In this study, we found that providing free HIVST kits significantly increased testing frequency among Chinese MSM and effectively enlarged HIV testing coverage by enhancing partner HIV testing through distribution of kits within their sexual networks.

Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR1800015584.

Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR1800015584.Predicting three-dimensional protein structure and assembling protein complexes using sequence information belongs to the most prominent tasks in computational biology. Recently substantial progress has been obtained in the case of single proteins using a combination of unsupervised coevolutionary sequence analysis with structurally supervised deep learning. While reaching impressive accuracies in predicting residue-residue contacts, deep learning has a number of disadvantages. The need for large structural training sets limits the applicability to multi-protein complexes; and their deep architecture makes the interpretability of the convolutional neural networks intrinsically hard. Here we introduce FilterDCA, a simpler supervised predictor for inter-domain and inter-protein contacts. It is based on the fact that contact maps of proteins show typical contact patterns, which results from secondary structure and are reflected by patterns in coevolutionary analysis. We explicitly integrate averaged contacts patterns with coevolutionary scores derived by Direct Coupling Analysis, improving performance over standard coevolutionary analysis, while remaining fully transparent and interpretable. The FilterDCA code is available at http//gitlab.lcqb.upmc.fr/muscat/FilterDCA.Identification of mutations of the genes that give cancer a selective advantage is an important step towards research and clinical objectives. As such, there has been a growing interest in developing methods for identification of driver genes and their temporal order within a single patient (intra-tumor) as well as across a cohort of patients (inter-tumor). In this paper, we develop a probabilistic model for tumor progression, in which the driver genes are clustered into several ordered driver pathways. We develop an efficient inference algorithm that exhibits favorable scalability to the number of genes and samples compared to a previously introduced ILP-based method. Adopting a probabilistic approach also allows principled approaches to model selection and uncertainty quantification. Using a large set of experiments on synthetic datasets, we demonstrate our superior performance compared to the ILP-based method. We also analyze two biological datasets of colorectal and glioblastoma cancers. buy AZD5069 We emphasize that while the ILP-based method puts many seemingly passenger genes in the driver pathways, our algorithm keeps focused on truly driver genes and outputs more accurate models for cancer progression.BACKGROUND Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is characterized by apical ballooning and excessive constriction of the base of heart. However, reverse takotsubo cardiomyopathy, wherein ballooning from the mid-ventricle to the base of the heart occurs with excessive constriction of the apex, has also been reported. We report a case of a transition from atypical wall motion abnormality to a typical takotsubo cardiomyopathy pattern. CASE REPORT A 54-year-old woman was following excessive sugar and dietary restrictions because of concerns regarding her blood sugar levels while receiving treatment for diabetes at another hospital. She presented at our hospital with general malaise and chest discomfort after several days of significantly increased workload. On admission, blood tests showed elevated cardiac enzymes. Electrocardiogram showed ST elevation of V2-V3 and poor R-wave enhancement of the anterior precordial lead. Coronary angiography showed no significant stenosis; however, left ventricular (LV) angiography showed a decrease in mid-ventricular wall motion. On the basis of these findings, she was diagnosed with a reverse takotsubo cardiomyopathy. We initiated conservative treatment for her condition. During her treatment, the LV wall motion showed a typical pattern of the apical ballooning that is characteristic of takotsubo cardiomyopathy. This LV wall motion was normalized on day 22 of the onset. CONCLUSIONS We observed a rare case of takotsubo cardiomyopathy where the pattern of LV wall motion abnormality changed over time. This case suggests that it is necessary to follow up LV abnormality over time rather than rely on single-point observations in cases with takotsubo cardiomyopathy.BACKGROUND This study aimed to investigate the therapeutic and prognostic effects of percutaneous transforaminal endoscopic decompression (PTED) for degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis (DLSS). MATERIAL AND METHODS One hundred eighty-eight patients with DLSS were randomly divided into the fenestration and the PTED group for decompression treatment. Operative time, incision length, amount of blood loss, length of hospitalization, and rates of complications in the 2 groups were compared. All patients underwent computed tomography (CT) scanning and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on the first postoperative day. All patients were assessed preoperatively and the treatment effects at 3, 6, and 12 months postoperatively were evaluated using visual analog scale (VAS), Japanese Orthopedic Association Score (JOA) and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI). The modified MacNab criteria were used to assess patient satisfaction 1 year after surgery at the last follow-up. RESULTS Patients who underwent PTED had shorter incisions, less blood loss, and shorter hospital stays than those in the fenestration group, but operative times and complication rates were similar in the 2 groups.