Viral decay curve

Once you start someone on ARVs, there's a predictable decline in viral load associated with it. This article from Nature Medicine has a nice figure, showing that different cell populations actually give rise to different portions of the decay curve, and as each replication within each "compartment" of cell type gets shut off by ARVs, that population's contribution to the viral load trails off, leading to the curve. (Hopefully it'll make better sense when you look at the figure!)

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v9/n7/fig_tab/nm0703-853_F2.html
from (http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v9/n7/full/nm0703-853.html)

- Christopher Hurt

Map of Moore Regional

For people heading down to Pinehurst, here's the map of Moore Regional Hospital:

http://www.firsthealth.org/PDF/maps/MRH_internal.pdf

- Christopher Hurt

Super cool HIV interactive graphic

The New England Journal published the studies of raltegravir's use/efficacy for patients with an optimized background regimen (OBR) recently, and it turns out they also had an online-only interactive graphic that would be great for teaching students and residents visiting on the service. It's online at:

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol359/issue4/images/data/339/DC2/AIDS_Interactive.shtml

Enjoy!

– Christopher Hurt, MD

Staying Up-to-Date (without Up-to-Date)

NATAP
The National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project (NATAP) is headed up by Jules Levin, who's been living with HIV and hepatitis C for many years and decided to take his interest in patient advocacy directly to the scientific community by attending research meetings. He has a small staff of dedicated writers who travel with him to all (literally) of the major conferences, from CROI to AIDS to the liver meetings, and provides a free service that's essentially a digest of the findings from these conferences. Daily emails (often many a day, especially during a conference) also keep you up on both scientific and lay press publications related to HIV issues from the political to the molecular. It's overwhelming at first, but it's worth taking a look at the headlines at least, every once in a while. It will sort of flood your inbox, but I think it's worth it if you want to stay up on current HIV news. You can sign up at http://www.natap.org/emaillist.htm .

eToCs
I'd recommend signing up for the electronic tables of contents (eToCs) for the major journals, which are really JID, CID, AIDS, and JAIDS. (Links below). It's helpful too to stay up on your internal medicine stuff in some limited way, with either the New England Journal, JAMA, or Annals of Internal Medicine (if you're an ACP member). As a new fellow, you qualify for free membership in the IDSA for your first year, along with free subscriptions to both JID and CID. Generally speaking, JID is more bench/lab-science based, while CID deals more with epidemiology and clinical or bench-to-bedside application research. You might also consider getting Lancet Infectious Diseases' eToC, too. It has excellent reviews of clinically applicable topics.

JID – http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jid/current

CID – http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/cid/current

AIDS – http://www.aidsonline.com/pt/re/aids/etocs

JAIDS – http://www.jaids.com/pt/re/jaids/etocs

NEJM – http://www.nejm.org/aboutnejm/etoc.asp

JAMA – http://pubs.ama-assn.org/cgi/alerts/etoc

Annals – http://www.annals.org/subscriptions/etoc.shtml

Lancet ID – http://www.thelancet.com/account/alerts


If you're a techie and know what an RSS feed is, these are the links for the journals' feeds:

JID – http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showFeed?ui=1zv&mi=0&ai=s1&jc=jid&type=etoc&feed=rss

CID – http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showFeed?ui=1zv&mi=0&ai=sb&jc=cid&type=etoc&feed=rss

AIDS – http://feeds.feedburner.com/wolterskluwer/aids/toccurrentrss

JAIDS – http://feed.jaids.com/wolterskluwer/jaids/toccurrentrss

NEJM – http://content.nejm.org/rss/current.xml

JAMA – http://jama.ama-assn.org/rss/current.xml

Annals – http://media.acponline.org/feeds/annalstoc.xml

Lancet ID – http://multimedia.thelancet.com/rss/laninf_current.xml


Getting to UNC Libraries online, from home
If you know the journal you're after, click on this:
http://www.hsl.unc.edu/Journals/EJSearch.cfm

If you don't know the journal, or are doing a general lit search, the UNC proxy for PubMed can be found at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/sites/entrez?holding=uncchlib_fft_ndi

You'll need your email login information before you can get to those resources, but you have access to everything at home that you do on campus, except two notable items: no Up-to-Date at home, and when you log into New England Journal, you can't download their pre-fabricated PowerPoint slides (unless you're a subscriber yourself).

– Christopher Hurt

Online Resources

Both Gretchen and I have pages of links to give you quick access to references that are used frequently. Mine is online at:

http://www.unc.edu/~churt/

– Christopher Hurt