“
“Background: Candida albicans has a variety of virulence factors, including

secreted aspartyl proteases, which are determinant factors in the pathogenesis of this yeast in immunocompromised patients. Aims: Proteinase activity was identified in C. albicans strains isolated from the oral cavity of immunocompromised patients with cancer, diabetes and HIV+, with oral candidiasis and in healthy subjects. Methods: Two hundred and fifty C. albicans strains were analyzed, distributed in 5 different groups: patients with cancer, diabetes, HIV+, with oral candidiasis and healthy subjects. Results: Proteolytic activity was identified NVP-BSK805 purchase in 46% of the strains from cancer patients, 54% from HIV+ patients, 60% from diabetics, 70% from oral candidiasis patients, and 42% from healthy subjects. Activity was higher in strains from

immunocompromised and oral candidiasis patients than in healthy subjects. Differences were observed between the candidiasis-healthy, candidiasis-HIV+, and diabetic-healthy groups. No differences were observed between the oral candidiasis, diabetes and cancer patients, between the diabetes and HIV+ patients, or between the cancer patients, HIV+ patients and healthy subjects. Conclusions: The present results suggest that although secreted aspartyl proteases are important in the pathogenesis of C albi cans, their activity depends on host conditions. (C) 2012 Revista lberoamericana de Micologia. Published by Elsevier Espaiia, S.L. All rights reserved.”
“Management of children with HIV/AIDS is specially

challenging. Age-related issues do not allow for direct transposition of adult observations to this Nocodazole molecular weight population. CXCR4 tropism has been associated with disease progression in adults. The geno2pheno web-base is a friendly tool to predict viral tropism on envelope V3 sequences, generating a false positive rate for a CXCR4 prediction. We evaluated the association of HIV-1 tropism prediction with clinical and laboratory outcome of 73 children with HIV/AIDS in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The CXCR4 tropism was strongly associated with a lower (nadir) CD4 documented during follow-up (p smaller than 0.0001) and with disease severity (clinical event and/or CD4 below 200 cells/mm(3)) at the last observation, using commonly applied clinical cutoffs, such as (FPRclonal)-F-10% (p = 0.001). When variables click here obtained during follow-up are included, both treatment adherence and viral tropism show a significant association with disease severity. As for viremia suppression, 30% (22/73) were undetectable at the last observation, with only adherence strongly associated with suppression after adjustment. The study brings further support to the notion that antiretroviral treatment adherence is pivotal to management of HIV disease, but suggests that tropism prediction may provide an additional prognostic marker to monitor HIV disease in children. (C) 2013 Elsevier Editora Ltda. All rights reserved.