Current efforts to fi nd a cure for HIV disease require that viral load assays be available to accurately detect and measure viral load in compartments other than peripheral blood. Over the years, HIV viral load assays have been adapted to measure viral presence in cerebral spinal fl uid (CSF), genital secretions and various other compartments. In this study we describe our efforts to quantitatively recover HIV-1 from pooled pediatric bone marrow plasma spiked with known concentrations of HIV-1 virus using the Abbott RealTime HIV-1 assay and the m2000 platform. We focused on nucleic acid extraction, sample dilution, viral copy recovery, linearity and limit of detection.

We describe the care burden derived of a lung cancer screening program in HIV high risk patients. In a well selected group with the described criteria, one annual low-dose thoracic computed tomographic exploration can be applied to a 7.2% of the patients attended (95%CI 4.2-9.6), with at least one follow-up exploration in another 1.3% with the generation of at least two extra visits for explanation of the protocol and results. If smoking habit does not change over the next two years, another 4.3% of the patients will have met the inclusion criteria. Early detection of lung cancer with low-dose thoracic computed tomographic could be of interest in HIV infected patients because the increased of risk, but would imply an increase in care burden that must be taken into account.

During the last decade, the link between Human Immunodefi ciency Virus (HIV) infection and cardiovascular disease has received much attention. Recent meta-anaylsis by Islam et al. [1], concluded that HIV infection increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). They found the relative risk (RR)