Personal Approach to Treatment Choices for HIV (PATCH): Randomized Controlled Trial of a Brief Motivational Enhancement Intervention to Improve Medication Adherence in Persons with HIV.

This pilot randomized controlled trial evaluated the feasibility and efficacy of a brief motivational enhancement intervention to improve adherence to antiretroviral therapy in persons with HIV called Personal Approach to Treatment Choices for HIV (PATCH). We compared PATCH to an active control condition on self-reported adherence, clinical outcomes, and psychosocial outcomes. Participants were 34 individuals (61.

Coping as a multisystem construct associated with pathways mediating HIV-relevant immune function and disease progression.

We review psychoneuroimmunological research linking coping with HIV disease progression and its indicators, as well as with viral and host factors that may mediate or contribute to HIV progression. Our perspective on coping broadly encompasses the attempts of multiple mental and biological systems to adapt to changing internal and environmental conditions and to reestablish homeostasis. Accordingly, we discuss studies within four dimensions of coping: cognitive (appraisals, expectancies, and explanatory style), emotional (the Type C coping pattern and related constructs), active-passive strategies and behavior patterns, and physiological (autonomic reactivity and recovery).

Integrating multidimensional HIV prevention programs into healthcare settings.

Effective secondary prevention programs to reduce HIV transmission risk-relevant behaviors among HIV-infected individuals must go beyond the traditional, common sense prevention components to develop biomedically and epidemiologically informed behavioral interventions as part of comprehensive, integrated, multidisciplinary HIV care. Incorporating and expanding on the Serostatus Approach to Fighting the Epidemic, a five-pronged strategy set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2001, we discuss recent findings from the biomedical sciences on viral and host factors that influence infectiousness to support the idea that the most proactive prevention programs will explicitly integrate biomedical interventions and approaches designed to reduce infectiousness, and thus the sexual transmission of HIV. Based on studies of emerging and spreading drug-resistant HIV variants, we have posited the potential development of biodisparity as the biological entrenchment of disparities in socioeconomic status, access to care, and HIV risk-relevant behaviors that differentially affect minorities living with HIV in the US.

Type C coping, alexithymia, and heart rate reactivity are associated independently and differentially with specific immune mechanisms linked to HIV progression.

The maladaptive Type C coping style has been linked to disease progression in HIV and other immunologically mediated disorders. We hypothesized that strong Type C coping, higher levels of alexithymia, and greater cardiovascular (particularly heart rate) responses to, and prolonged recovery from stress would be associated with poorer functioning of immune parameters previously linked to HIV pathogenesis and progression: (1) antigen-stimulated production of the beta (beta)-chemokines MIP-1 alpha and MIP-1 beta, which bind to the HIV co-receptor CCR5 and block HIV entry into CD4(+) lymphocytes; and (2) antigen-stimulated production of the proinflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), which synergizes immune activation associated with HIV replication. We examined relations among psychological, cardiovascular, and immune variables in a baseline sample of 200 HIV-infected, predominantly African American outpatients attending an HIV primary care clinic in inner-city Baltimore.

Prevalence of cocaine use in ED patients with severe hypertension.

Study Objective: We prospectively evaluated the prevalence of cocaine use in emergency department patients with elevated diastolic blood pressure greater than 120 mm Hg.

Design: Urine was collected on adult patients with diastolic blood pressure greater than 120 mm Hg. The Institutional Review Board granted a waiver of informed consent based on complete deidentification of the data to prevent selection bias.

Change is complex: rethinking research on psychosocial interventions and cancer.

The widely discussed 1989 study by Spiegel and colleagues, which suggested that a psychosocial group intervention affected survival in metastatic breast cancer, was not replicated by Goodwin and colleagues in 2001. We analyze methodological issues in both studies, including issues of sampling, randomization, interpretation, and the adequacy and validity of psychosocial constructs and measures to assess hypothesized ingredients of change. The notion of psychogenicity is introduced, conceived as the ability of psychosocial interventions to elicit changes hypothesized to be linked to desired medical outcomes.