(Press-News.org) PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Policymakers struggling to stop the spread of HIV grapple with "what if" questions on the scale of millions of people and decades of time. They need a way to predict the impact of many potential interventions, alone or in combination. In two papers to be presented at the 2012 International AIDS Society Conference in Washington, D.C., Brandon Marshall, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, will unveil a computer program calibrated to model accurately the spread of HIV in New York City over a decade and to make specific predictions about the future of the epidemic under various intervention scenarios.
"It reflects what's seen in the real world," said Marshall. "What we're trying to do is identify the ideal combination of interventions to reduce HIV most dramatically in injection drug users."
In an analysis that he'll present at 11 a.m. in Session Room 6 on Friday, July 27, Marshall projects that with no change in New York City's current programs, the infection rate among injection drug users will be 2.1 per 1,000 in 2040. Expanding HIV testing would drop the rate only 12 percent to 1.9 per 1,000; increasing drug treatment would reduce the rate 26 percent to 1.6 per 1,000; providing earlier delivery of antiretroviral therapy and better adherence would drop the rate 45 percent to 1.2 per 1,000; and expanding needle exchange programs would reduce the rate 34 percent to 1.4 per 1,000. Most importantly, doing all four of those things would cut the rate by more than 60 percent, to 0.8 per 1,000.
"These results show that a comprehensive set of proven interventions must be scaled up immediately if we are to substantially reduce the spread of HIV among drug users," Marshall said.
Virtual reality, real choices
The model is unique in that it creates a virtual reality of 150,000 "agents," a programming term for simulated individuals, who in the case of the model, engage in drug use and sexual activity like real people.
Like characters in an all-too-serious video game, the agents behave in a world governed by biological rules, such as how often the virus can be transmitted through encounters such as unprotected gay sex or needle sharing.
With each run of the model, agents accumulate a detailed life history. For example, in one run, agent 89,425, who is male and has sex with men, could end up injecting drugs. He participates in needle exchanges, but according to the built-in probabilities, in year three he shares needles multiple times with another injection drug user with whom he is also having unprotected sex. In the last of those encounters, agent 89,425 becomes infected with HIV. In year four he starts participating in drug treatment and in year five he gets tested for HIV, starts antiretroviral treatment, and reduces the frequency with which he has unprotected sex. Because he always takes his HIV medications, he never transmits the virus further.
That level of individual detail allows for a detailed examination of transmission networks and how interventions affect them.
"With this model you can really look at the microconnections between people," said Marshall, who began working on the model as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and has continued to develop it since coming to Brown in January. "That's something that we're really excited about."
To calibrate the model, Marshall and his colleagues found the best New York City data they could about how many people use drugs, what percentage of people were gay or lesbian, the probabilities of engaging in unprotected sex and needle sharing, viral transmission, access to treatment, treatment effectiveness, participation in drug treatment, progression from HIV infection to AIDS, and many more behavioral, social and medical factors. They also continuously calibrated it until the model could faithfully reproduce the infection rates among injection drug users that were known to occur in New York between 1992 and 2002.
And they don't just run the simulation once. They run it thousands of times on a supercomputer at Brown to be sure the results they see are reliable.
Future applications
At Brown, Marshall is continuing to work on other aspects of the model, including an analysis of the cost effectiveness of each intervention and their combinations. Cost is, after all, another fact of life that policymakers and public health officials must weigh.
And then there's the frustrating insight that the infection rate, even with four strengthened interventions underway, didn't reduce the projected epidemic by much more than half.
"I actually expected something larger," Marshall said. "That speaks to how hard we have to work to make sure that drug users can access and benefit from proven interventions to reduce the spread of HIV."
INFORMATION:
Marshall's collaborators on the model include Magdalena Paczkowski, Lars Seemann, Barbara Tempalski, Enrique Pouget, Sandro Galea, and Samuel Friedman.
The National Institutes of Health and the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research provide financial support for the model's continued development.
Computers can predict effects of HIV policies
Talks to be delivered at 2012 International AIDS Society Conference
2012-07-27
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Accelerated resolution therapy significantly reduces PTSD symptoms, researchers report
2012-07-27
July 27, 2012 (Tampa, FL) – Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Nursing have shown that brief treatments with Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) substantially reduce symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) including, depression, anxiety, sleep dysfunction and other physical and psychological symptoms. The findings of this first study of ART appear in an on-line article published June 18, 2012 in the Journal Behavioral Sciences.
ART is being studied as an alternative to traditional PTSD treatments that use drugs or ...
The Olympics and bare feet: What have we learned?
2012-07-27
Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila made history when he earned a gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. His speed and agility won him the gold, but it was barefoot running that made him a legend.
When the shoes Bikila was given for the race didn't fit comfortably, he ditched them for his bare feet. After all, that's the way he had trained for the Olympics in his homeland.
Racing shoeless led to success for Bikila, and now, more than 50 years later, runners are continuing to take barefoot strides. Several Olympic runners have followed Bikila and nationally the trend ...
In-utero exposure to magnetic fields associated with increased risk of obesity in childhood
2012-07-27
In-utero exposure to relatively high magnetic field levels was associated with a 69 percent increased risk of being obese or overweight during childhood compared to lower in-utero magnetic field levels, according to a Kaiser Permanente study that appears in the current online version of Nature's Scientific Reports.
Researchers conducted the prospective cohort study, in which participating women in Kaiser Permanente's Northern California region carried a meter measuring magnetic field levels during pregnancy and 733 of their children were followed up to 13 years, to collect ...
Future of California high-speed rail looks green
2012-07-27
Berkeley — A new analysis gives Californians good reason to be optimistic about the green credentials of the state's proposed high-speed rail project, due to begin construction in 2013 thanks to funding recently approved by state legislators.
Arpad Horvath at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mikhail Chester at Arizona State University compared the future sustainability of California high-speed rail with that of competing modes of transportation, namely automobile and air travel. They determined that, in terms of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, ...
Breakthrough treatment reduces post-surgical scarring for glaucoma patients
2012-07-27
Scientists at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developed an innovative way to combat post-surgical scarring for glaucoma patients.
A clinical trial has shown that the use of a new drug delivery method has resulted in 40 per cent fewer injections needed by glaucoma patients to prevent scarring after surgery. This also means fewer hospital visits for these patients in future.
Glaucoma, a disease characterised by a build-up of pressure in the eye, is a major cause of blindness worldwide. It affects about 3 per ...
UK welfare reform 'uninspiring' and adding to economic woes and inequality
2012-07-27
London (July 27 2012). The terms of welfare reform and Labor market activation in the UK need to be re-set, according to a senior university policy expert Andrew Jones, director of the Local Economy Policy Unit at London South Bank University, and editor of Local Economy, published by SAGE. He warns that the UK Government's predominant philosophy towards the UK Welfare state accepts and supports social hierarchy and defends privilege. This, he argues, is re-creating and strengthening the conditions that provoked the 2007 economic crisis.
"The rapid movement along this ...
Turbulent relationship among massive stars
2012-07-27
An international team of researchers from the USA and Europe including from the University of Bonn under the direction of Dr. Hugues Sana (University of Amsterdam) has discovered that the most massive stars in the universe don't spend their lives in space as singles as was previously thought. More than two-thirds orbit a partner star. "The orbit paths of the stars are very close together so that the region around these stars is turbulent and by far not as calm as previously thought," says Professor Norbert Langer from the University of Bonn. What happens is that one star ...
Nano-FTIR - A new era in modern analytical chemistry
2012-07-27
An ultimate goal in modern chemistry and materials science is the non-invasive chemical mapping of materials with nanometer scale resolution. A variety of high-resolution imaging techniques exist (e.g. electron microscopy or scanning probe microscopy), however, their chemical sensitivity cannot meet the demands of modern chemical nano-analytics. Optical spectroscopy, on the other hand, offers high chemical sensitivity but its resolution is limited by diffraction to about half the wavelength, thus preventing nanoscale resolved chemical mapping.
Nanoscale chemical identification ...
BELLA laser achieves world record power at 1 pulse per second
2012-07-27
On the night of July 20, 2012, the laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), which is nearing completion at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long at a pulse rate of one hertz – one pulse every second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, a quadrillion watts, and a femtosecond is 10-15 second, a quadrillionth of a second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this rapid pulse rate.
"This represents a new world record," said Wim Leemans ...
Study finds gaps in services for heterosexual men with HIV
2012-07-27
TORONTO, July 27,2012 –Heterosexual men make up a small but growing number of people infected with HIV in Canada.
Yet a new study has found that many of them feel existing HIV-related programs and services don't meet their needs and are geared primarily or exclusively toward gay men and heterosexual women who are living with the virus.
"Heterosexual men tend to go through HIV alone," said Tony Antoniou, a pharmacist and research scholar in the Department of Family Medicine at St. Michael's Hospital. "They feel very isolated."
Antoniou said the study, published in the ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
CMD-OPT model enables the discovery of a potent and selective RIPK2 inhibitor as preclinical candidate for the treatment of acute liver injury
Melatonin receptor 1a alleviates sleep fragmentation-aggravated testicular injury in T2DM by suppression of TAB1/TAK1 complex through FGFR1
Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals Shen-Bai-Jie-Du decoction retards colorectal tumorigenesis by regulating the TMEM131–TNF signaling pathway-mediated differentiation of immunosuppressive dendritic ce
Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B Volume 15, Issue 7 Publishes
New research expands laser technology
Targeted radiation offers promise in patients with metastasized small cell lung cancer to the brain
A high clinically translatable strategy to anti-aging using hyaluronic acid and silk fibroin co-crosslinked hydrogels as dermal regenerative fillers
Mount Sinai researchers uncover differences in how males and females change their mind when reflecting on past mistakes
CTE and normal aging are difficult to distinguish, new study finds
Molecular arms race: How the genome defends itself against internal enemies
Tiny chip speeds up antibody mapping for faster vaccine design
KTU experts reveal why cultural heritage is important for community unity
More misfolded proteins than previously known may contribute to Alzheimer’s and dementia
“Too much going on”: Autistic adults overwhelmed by non-verbal social cues
What’s driving America’s deep freezes in a warming world?
A key role of brain protein in learning and memory is deciphered by scientists
Heart attacks don’t follow a Hollywood script
Erin M. Schuman wins 2026 Nakasone Award for discovery on neural synapse function and change during formation of memories
Global ocean analysis could replace costly in-situ sound speed profiles in seafloor positioning, study finds
Power in numbers: Small group professional coaching reduces rates of physician burnout by nearly 30%
Carbon capture, utilization, and storage: A comprehensive review of CCUS-EOR
New high-temperature stable dispersed particle gel for enhanced profile control in CCUS applications
State gun laws and firearm-related homicides and suicides
Use of tobacco and cannabis following state-level cannabis legalization
Long-term obesity and biological aging in young adults
Eindhoven University of Technology and JMIR Publications announce unlimited open access publishing agreement
Orphan nuclear receptors in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease development
A technological breakthrough for ultra-fast and greener AI
Pusan National University researchers identify key barriers hindering data-driven smart manufacturing adoption
Inking heterometallic nanosheets: A scalable breakthrough for coating, electronics, and electrocatalyst applications
[Press-News.org] Computers can predict effects of HIV policiesTalks to be delivered at 2012 International AIDS Society Conference