Veterans Health Administration Primary Care Provider Adherence to Prescribing Guidelines for Systemic Hormone Therapy in Menopausal Women.

Background: Systemic hormone therapy (HT) is effective for treating menopausal symptoms but also confers risks. Therefore, experts have developed clinical guidelines for its use.

Purpose: We assessed primary care guideline adherence in prescribing systemic HT, and associations between adherence and provider characteristics, in four Veterans Health Administration (VA) facilities.

Chronic exposure to type-I IFN under lymphopenic conditions alters CD4 T cell homeostasis.

HIV infection and the associated chronic immune activation alter T cell homeostasis leading to CD4 T cell depletion and CD8 T cell expansion. The mechanisms behind these outcomes are not totally defined and only partially explained by the direct cytopathic effect of the virus. In this manuscript, we addressed the impact of lymphopenia and chronic exposure to IFN-α on T cell homeostasis.

CD4 and CD8 T cell immune activation during chronic HIV infection: roles of homeostasis, HIV, type I IFN, and IL-7.

Immune activation plays an important role in the pathogenesis of HIV disease. Although the causes are not fully understood, the forces that lead to immune dysfunction differ for CD4 and CD8 T cells. In this study, we report that the molecular pathways that drive immune activation during chronic HIV infection are influenced by differences in the homeostatic regulation of the CD4 and CD8 T cell pools.