Our data confirm the variety of benign and malignant pathologies coursing with increased CA-125. Cardiovascular and chronic liver disease were the most frequent diagnoses in patients with increased CA-125; this supports the opinion that CA-125 lacks utility as a marker for malignancy. CA-125 could have a role in the follow-up of cardiovascular, hepatic, and tumoral diseases with serosal involvement.

Persistence of plasma DNA with features of tumor DNA may be present after mastectomy in breast cancer patients, and its relation to bad-prognosis histological parameters may suggest undetectable micrometastatic disease.

The response to pegylated interferon (pegIFN) plus ribavirin (RBV) as treatment of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is lower in HIV-coinfected than in HCV-monoinfected patients and could be due to suboptimal RBV dosing and/or insufficient duration of therapy in prior trials. In a prospective, multicenter, open, comparative trial, HCV/HIV-coinfected patients received pegIFN plus weight-based RBV for 48 or 72 weeks (HCV genotypes 1 and 4) and 24 or 48 weeks (HCV genotypes 2 and 3). Use of didanosine was not allowed. Out of 389 patients included in the trial, 61% were infected by HCV-1/4 and 67% had serum HCV-RNA >500,000 IU/ml. Sustained virological response (SVR) was achieved by 49.6%, significantly higher in HCV-2/3 than HCV-1/4 (72.4% vs. 35%; p < 0.0001). A high drop-out rate in the longer treatment arms precluded obtaining definitive conclusions about the efficacy of prolonging therapy. Premature treatment discontinuations due to serious adverse events occurred in 8.2%. Infection with HCV-2/3, lower baseline HCV-RNA, and negative HCV-RNA at week 12 were all independent predictors of SVR in the multivariate analysis. The use of RBV 1000-1200 mg/day plus pegIFN is relatively safe and provides SVR in nearly half of coinfected patients, twice as high in HCV-2/3 than HCV-1/4.

We recently reported the finding of phylogenetically related HIV-1 BG intersubtype recombinant and G subtype nonrecombinant viruses circulating among injecting drug users in the region of Galicia in northwestern Spain. Here, we report the characterization of near full-length genome sequences of nine of these viruses (seven BG recombinant and two of nonrecombinant G subtype), obtained from epidemiologically unlinked individuals. Bootscan analysis reveals that six recombinant viruses share an identical mosaic structure, with two intersubtype breakpoints delimiting a B subtype segment comprising most of Env gp120 and the external portion of Env gp41, with the remaining portions of the genome being of subtype G, thus mimicking a pseudotype virion structure. The seventh BG recombinant virus exhibits breakpoints in env coincident with the other BG viruses but contains additional B subtype segments in gag and pol. In phylogenetic trees of complete genomes and of the B subtype segment of env, all seven BG viruses group in a monophyletic cluster. G subtype portions of the BG viruses group uniformly with the newly derived nonrecombinant G subtype viruses of Galicia in bootscan analysis, which points to the locally circulating G subtype strain as parental of the recombinants. These results allow us to define a new HIV-1 circulating recombinant form (CRF14_BG), the first reported to originate in Western Europe.

The substitution of tenofovir for stavudine causes a sustained improvement of dyslipidaemia. The reduction, although modest, is robust and sustained over time, and significantly reduces the CVR. This switch strategy is safe and contributes to an improvement in the lipid profile, especially TG, in HAART-treated patients.