The increased risk of SVA/SCD for current domperidone users remained after adjustment for multiple covariates. The risk may vary among subgroups of exposed individuals.

This study found that 25% of patients with Type 2 diabetes had insulin initiation delayed for at least 1.8 years, and 50% of patients delayed starting insulin for almost 5 years after failure of glycaemic control with OGLA polytherapy, even in the presence of diabetes-related complications. Interventions that reduce this delay to insulin initiation are required to help achieve and maintain recommended glycaemic targets in patients with Type 2 diabetes.

IntroductionEpidemiological studies have linked domperidone use with serious cardiac arrhythmias, including sudden cardiac death, but data on age, dose, and duration of use are limited.ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to assess the risk of out-of-hospital sudden cardiac death associated with domperidone use versus proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), metoclopramide, or non-use of all three medications, and to evaluate the risk of sudden cardiac death in relation to age and domperidone dose.MethodsThis was a population-based case-control study nested in a cohort of subjects aged ≥2 years in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink with one or more prescriptions for domperidone, any PPI, or metoclopramide from 2005 to 2011. Out-of-hospital sudden cardiac death was assessed by linkage with Hospital Episode Statistics and death certificates. Controls were matched on age, sex, and medical practice. The risk of sudden cardiac death in domperidone users versus risk in users of PPIs or metoclopramide was evaluated with multivariable conditional logistic regression; case-crossover analysis addressed possible residual confounding.ResultsFrom the study cohort (n = 681,104), 3239 sudden cardiac death cases were matched to 12,572 controls. The adjusted odds ratio (95 % confidence interval) for sudden cardiac death with current use of domperidone alone was 1.71 (0.92–3.18) versus non-use of study medications, 1.26 (0.68–2.34) versus current PPI use, and 0.40 (0.17–0.94) current metoclopramide use. The adjusted odds ratio (95 % confidence interval) relative to exposure to no study drug for domperidone >30 mg/day (eight cases, five controls) was 3.20 (0.59–17.3) and 1.65 (0.89–3.07) for age ≥61 years (27 cases, 49 controls). The odds ratio (95 % confidence interval) was 3.17 (1.72–5.83) for within-person periods of domperidone use versus non-use in the case-crossover analysis.ConclusionsCompared with non-use of any study drug, current domperidone use was associated with sudden cardiac death in nested case-control and case-crossover analyses, with a suggestion of higher risk in older persons and users of higher daily doses.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40264-015-0338-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

An independent quality assurance program has been established by the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for monitoring virologic assays performed by nearly 40 laboratories participating in multicenter clinical trials in the United States. Since virologic endpoints are important in evaluating the timing and efficacy of therapeutic interventions, it is imperative that virologic measurements be accurate and uniform. When the quality assurance program was initially created, fewer than 40%o of the laboratories could consistently recover human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of HIVinfected patients. By comparing coculture procedures in the more competent laboratories with those in laboratories who were struggling to isolate virus, optimal conditions were established and nonessential reagents and practices were eliminated. Changes were rapidly introduced into a laboratory when experience dictated that * Corresponding author.

Six procedures for quantifying plasma human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) RNA were evaluated by nine laboratories. The procedures differed in their sample volume and preparation of samples and methods of amplification and detection. Coded samples in a 10-fold dilution series of HIV-1-spiked plasma were correctly ranked by all six procedures. Subsequently, coded duplicate plasma samples from 16 HIV-1-infected patients were tested using a common set of standards. Several HIV-1 RNA procedures were sufficiently reproducible so that an empiric 4-fold change could be viewed as significant. HIV-1 RNA levels in the patients (up to 370,000 RNA copies/mL) correlated with proviral HIV-1 DNA and were inversely correlated with CD4 cell counts; HIV-1 RNA assays were more sensitive than plasma viremia, standard p24 antigen, or immune complex-dissociated p24 antigen assays. This study demonstrated that several HIV-1 RNA quantitative assays are ready for use in clinical trials.

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PurposeTo describe the use of antimuscarinic drugs to treat overactive bladder (OAB) in Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (UK).MethodsWe identified new users of darifenacin, fesoterodine, oxybutynin, solifenacin, tolterodine, and trospium aged 18 years or older from the Danish National Registers (2004–2012), the Swedish National Registers (2006–2012), and UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (2004–2012). Users were followed until disenrollment, cancer diagnosis, death, or study end. Treatment episodes, identified by linking consecutive prescriptions, were described with respect to duration, drug switch, and drug add-on.ResultsMean age of OAB drug users was 66 years in Denmark (n = 72,917) and Sweden (n = 130,944), and 62 years in the UK (n = 119,912); 60% of Danish and Swedish patients and 70% of UK patients were female. In Denmark, of 224,680 treatment episodes, 39% were with solifenacin, and 35% with tolterodine; 2% were with oxybutynin. In Sweden, of 240,141 therapy episodes, 37% were with tolterodine and 35% with solifenacin; 5% were with oxybutynin. In the UK, of 245,800 treatment episodes, 28% were with oxybutynin, 27% with solifenacin, and 26% with tolterodine. In the three countries, 49%-52% of treatment episodes comprised one prescription and over 80% of episodes ended because of no refill; less than 20% ended because of a switch to another antimuscarinic. During the study years, we observed a change in OAB treatment preference from tolterodine to solifenacin.ConclusionsIn these cohorts, persistence with antimuscarinic drugs was low. By 2012, the preferred drug was solifenacin; oxybutynin use was marginal in Nordic countries compared with the UK.

Assigning biological functions to uncharacterized proteins is a fundamental problem in the postgenomic era. The increasing availability of large amounts of data on protein-protein interactions (PPIs) has led to the emergence of a considerable number of computational methods for determining protein function in the context of a network. These algorithms, however, treat each functional class in isolation and thereby often suffer from the difficulty of the scarcity of labeled data. In reality, different functional classes are naturally dependent on one another. We propose a new algorithm, Multi-label Correlated Semi-supervised Learning (MCSL), to incorporate the intrinsic correlations among functional classes into protein function prediction by leveraging the relationships provided by the PPI network and the functional class network. The guiding intuition is that the classification function should be sufficiently smooth on subgraphs where the respective topologies of these two networks are a good match. We encode this intuition as regularized learning with intraclass and interclass consistency, which can be understood as an extension of the graph-based learning with local and global consistency (LGC) method. Cross validation on the yeast proteome illustrates that MCSL consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Most notably, it effectively overcomes the problem associated with scarcity of label data. The supplementary files are freely available at http://sites.google.com/site/csaijiang/MCSL.