Degrees from for-profit collegescan cost up to four times as much as a comparable degree from a public college.
Photo by Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock
People with college degrees make more money than people without college degrees. They are also less likely to experience unemployment, and if they do, they tend to be unemployed for shorter spells than those without a degree. Lots of really smart people—like Jonathan Cowan and Jim Kessler, of the centrist policy agency Third Way, in a recent piece for the New York Times—look at that data and interpret it to mean that increased college enrollment, which itself was a product of the 2007–08 economic crisis, bodes well for our economic insecurity, persistent high unemployment rates, and yawning inequality. They are wrong.
Crowing about degree expansion creates an ideology of a higher education “crisis” that is really a labor market crisis.
Cowan and Kessler are right that college enrollment surged after the economic crisis—an 18 percent increase since 2006. They see these data points as signs of America’s can-do spirit clearing a path out of the economic darkness. But to really understand what the data means, we need some historical perspective. College enrollment in the 1960s and ’70s spiked to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the U.S. economy. In contrast, the economy of 2006–2011 has done anything but expand. At best, we’ve narrowly escaped a depression. When millions of workers opt into college under these conditions, it’s more about gnawing fear than exuberance.
In addition to the shrinking economy, the job market is increasingly polarized, with one labor market happening for the most skilled and another for the least. The champions of college-degree attainment skip over a sobering fact: There are not enough high-skill jobs to compensate for those lost in the middle. And the contraction of jobs in the middle means fewer pathways for low-skill workers to move up.
Smart people should know this. So why do they continue to make arguments about how higher education is going to save our faltering economy? For one thing, the message isn’t entirely wrong. I believe in college enough that I have—as a 5-year-old recently told me—“gone all the way to the 20th grade in school.” College can be a transformative experience. The public good benefits when there are affordable, high-quality college choices available to all. But those choices are not the same for everyone. Cowan and Kessler herald the 3.5 million degrees conferred over the last six years because that number “blows past previous highs.” But not all college degrees are created equal. African-Americans and Hispanics increased their college participation during the same time period, but most of that growth occurred in for-profit colleges.In 2013, the for-profit University of Phoenix was the No. 1 producer of African-Americans with a bachelor’s degree. Whether one loves them or hates them, it’s generally agreed that degrees from for-profit colleges can cost up to four times as much as a comparable degree from a public college.
We also know significantly less about how well for-profit graduates and drop-outs fare in the labor market as compared to decades of studies about traditional college graduates. And we know next to nothing about the social mobility of the disproportionately poor and minority students who are most likely to enroll in for-profits. Though we lack a clear picture of what happens to them once after they enroll, we can make an educated guess about why they enroll in the first place. In 2009, during the lowest depths of the economic crisis, David Pauldine, president of for-profit DeVry University, told the New York Times, “I have heard repeatedly from our admissions offices that when they interview prospective students, they’re saying they just lost their job or fear that they might lose their job.” Four years later, those fears about job loss and reduced benefits and wages have yet to taper off, according to a Gallup poll from last month.
All of the crowing about degree expansion ignores this kind of insecurity and stratification of degree attainment and outcomes. It also creates an ideology of a higher education “crisis” that is really a labor market crisis. In The Great Risk Shift, Jacob S. Hacker details the private sector’s successful outsourcing of corporate and public sector risk onto individuals: Pensions became 401(k)s, welfare subsidies got time limits and work requirements, health insurance premiums sky-rocketed. A similar shift occurred at the institutional level as all responsibility for workforce training and career security was transferred to colleges and universities. It is a nifty trick that unfairly frames higher ed as a problem to be solved.
The real problem is that conferring more degrees in a polarized, stagnant job market can only create more stratification as more people compete for fewer good jobs. For the most vulnerable, that is a particularly dangerous scenario as they pay the most for degrees, need a good job more desperately to justify the expense, and are least likely to have the social connections that grease the wheels of the high-skill labor market. The great shift and the resulting stratification are bad enough. But expecting us to buy the delusion that it is good for us is just adding insult to injury.
A reader remarked last week that Barack Obama is running out of human shields. With the father of ObamaCare unavailable to explain the greatest fiasco of his presidency to Congress, the American people had to settle Wednesday for his surrogate, Kathleen Sebelius.
Contact: Alan Buis Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov 818-354-0474 NASA/Johnson Space Center
Built with spare parts and without a moment to spare, the International Space Station (ISS)-RapidScat isn't your average NASA Earth science mission.
Short for Rapid Scatterometer, ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds from the vantage point of the space station. It will join a handful of other satellite scatterometer missions that make essential measurements used to support weather and marine forecasting, including the tracking of storms and hurricanes. It will also help improve our understanding of how interactions between Earth's ocean and atmosphere influence our climate.
Scientists study ocean winds for a variety of reasons. Winds over the ocean are an important part of weather systems, and in severe storms such as hurricanes they can inflict major damage. Ocean storms drive coastal surges, which are a significant hazard for populations. At the same time, by driving warm surface ocean water away from the coast, ocean winds cause nutrient-rich deep water to well up, providing a major source of food for coastal fisheries. Changes in ocean wind also help us monitor large-scale changes in Earth's climate, such as El Nio.
Scatterometers work by safely bouncing low-energy microwaves - the same kind used at high energy to warm up food in your kitchen - off the surface of Earth. In this case, the surface is not land, but the ocean. By measuring the strength and direction of the microwave echo, ISS-RapidScat will be able to determine how fast, and in what direction, ocean winds are blowing.
"Microwave energy emitted by a radar instrument is reflected back to the radar more strongly when the surface it illuminates is rougher," explains Ernesto Rodrguez, principal investigator for ISS-RapidScat at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "When wind blows over water, it causes waves to develop along the direction of wind. The stronger the wind, the larger the waves."
ISS-RapidScat continues a legacy of measuring ocean winds from space that began in 1978 with the launch of NASA's SeaSat satellite. Most recently, NASA's QuikScat scatterometer, which launched in 1999, gave us a dynamic picture of the world's ocean winds.
But when QuikScat lost its ability to produce ocean wind measurements in 2009, science suffered from the loss of the data. In the summer of 2012, an opportunity arose to fly a scatterometer instrument on the space station. ISS-RapidScat was the result.
Most scatterometer-carrying satellites fly in what's called a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth. In other words, they cross Earth's equator at the same local time every orbit. The space station, however, will carry the ISS-RapidScat in a non-sun-synchronous orbit. This means the instrument will see different parts of the planet at different times of day, making measurements in the same spot within less than an hour before or after another instrument makes its own observations. These all-hour measurements will allow ISS-RapidScat to pick up the effects of the sun on ocean winds as the day progresses. In addition, the space station's coverage over the tropics means that ISS-RapidScat will offer extra tracking of storms that may develop into hurricanes or other tropical cyclones.
Anywhere the wind blows
"We'll be able to see how wind speed changes with the time of day," said Rodrguez. "ISS-RapidScat will link together all previous and current scatterometer missions, providing us with a more complete picture of how ocean winds change. Combined with data from the European ASCAT scatterometer mission, we'll be able to observe 90 percent of Earth's surface at least once a day, and in many places, several times a day."
ISS-RapidScat's near-global coverage of Earth's ocean -- within the space station's orbit inclination of 51.6 degrees north and south of the equator -- will make it an important tool for scientists who observe and predict Earth's weather. "Frequent observations of the winds over the ocean are used by meteorologists to improve weather and hurricane forecasts and by the operational weather communities to improve numerical weather models," said Rodrguez.
Space-based scatterometer instruments have been built before, but much of what makes ISS-RapidScat unusual is how it came to be. "Space Station Program Manager Michael Suffredini offered us a mounting location on the space station and a free ride on a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply mission launching in early 2014," explained Howard Eisen, the ISS-RapidScat project manager at JPL. "So we had about 18 months to put together an entire mission."
This accelerated timeline is a blink of an eye at NASA, where the typical project is years or decades in the making.
Free ride
Next, Eisen and his team turned to getting creative and crafty with the mission's hardware. In lieu of using newly-designed instruments, which would be expensive and take too long to develop, ISS-RapidScat reuses leftover hardware originally built to test parts of the QuikScat mission. That process involved dusting off and testing pieces of equipment that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1990s. Fortunately the old hardware seems ship-shape and ready to go. "Even though they were spares, they've done an excellent job so far," said Simon Collins, ISS-RapidScat's instrument manager at JPL. Despite their age, the old parts are more than capable of collecting the ocean wind data that ISS-RapidScat need to be a success.
In addition to old spare parts, some new hardware was needed to interface this instrument to the space station and the Dragon spacecraft. ISS-RapidScat will use off-the-shelf, commercially-available computer hardware instead of the expensive, hardened-against-radiation computer chips that are typically used in space missions. "If there's an error or something because of radiation, all we have to do is reset the computer. It's what we call a managed risk," said Eisen. The radiation environment on the space station is much less severe than that experienced en route to Mars, for example, or in more traditional sun-synchronous orbits.
Science bounty
Cost-saving decisions like this are shaping up to make ISS-RapidScat an exceptional bargain of a space mission. "We're doing things differently, and we're trying to do them quickly and cheaply," said Eisen. Considering that the typical launch alone can cost $200 million, ISS-RapidScat's estimated $26 million price tag seems like a bargain. Last year, NASA estimated the cost of a new, free-flying scatterometer satellite mission at approximately $400 million.
The real challenges of getting ISS-RapidScat into space lie in the details. One of the major headaches of such a hurried schedule has been getting the special connectors that will allow ISS-RapidScat to physically attach to the International Space Station. "They're special robotically-mated connectors that haven't been made in years," Eisen said. "We're having to convince the company that produces these connectors to make us a small run in time for the mission, and it hasn't been easy."
The logistics of operating an instrument on the space station are also tricky. "Typically, spacecraft are designed for the instruments they carry," said Collins. "In this case, it's the other way around." For example, ISS-RapidScat's docking point on the space station faces outward toward space - not down toward Earth and the ocean that the instrument is looking at. The space station's flying angle will also change as new pieces are added to it, in response to changes in the station's drag profile. ISS-RapidScat's mount can compensate for both of these challenges.
Another concern the ISS-RapidScat team confronted early on was that one of the space station's docking ports lies squarely within the field of view of the scatterometer. "Bombarding astronauts and visiting supply vehicles with microwave radiation from the instruments was out of the question, and turning the instrument off when there were things docked there would take away too much science," explained Collins. The project's engineers instead devised a plan where the instrument avoids irradiating docking vessels, but continues to scan across the vast majority of its viewing range.
Rodrguez is confident that the reward for overcoming such difficulties will be a bounty of vital science information. "Because it uses much of the same hardware QuikScat did, ISS-RapidScat will allow us to continue the observations of ocean winds already started," said Rodriguez. "Extending this data record will help us observe and understand weather patterns and improve our preparedness for tropical cyclones."
###
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Watching Earth's winds, on a shoestring
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Alan Buis Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov 818-354-0474 NASA/Johnson Space Center
Built with spare parts and without a moment to spare, the International Space Station (ISS)-RapidScat isn't your average NASA Earth science mission.
Short for Rapid Scatterometer, ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds from the vantage point of the space station. It will join a handful of other satellite scatterometer missions that make essential measurements used to support weather and marine forecasting, including the tracking of storms and hurricanes. It will also help improve our understanding of how interactions between Earth's ocean and atmosphere influence our climate.
Scientists study ocean winds for a variety of reasons. Winds over the ocean are an important part of weather systems, and in severe storms such as hurricanes they can inflict major damage. Ocean storms drive coastal surges, which are a significant hazard for populations. At the same time, by driving warm surface ocean water away from the coast, ocean winds cause nutrient-rich deep water to well up, providing a major source of food for coastal fisheries. Changes in ocean wind also help us monitor large-scale changes in Earth's climate, such as El Nio.
Scatterometers work by safely bouncing low-energy microwaves - the same kind used at high energy to warm up food in your kitchen - off the surface of Earth. In this case, the surface is not land, but the ocean. By measuring the strength and direction of the microwave echo, ISS-RapidScat will be able to determine how fast, and in what direction, ocean winds are blowing.
"Microwave energy emitted by a radar instrument is reflected back to the radar more strongly when the surface it illuminates is rougher," explains Ernesto Rodrguez, principal investigator for ISS-RapidScat at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "When wind blows over water, it causes waves to develop along the direction of wind. The stronger the wind, the larger the waves."
ISS-RapidScat continues a legacy of measuring ocean winds from space that began in 1978 with the launch of NASA's SeaSat satellite. Most recently, NASA's QuikScat scatterometer, which launched in 1999, gave us a dynamic picture of the world's ocean winds.
But when QuikScat lost its ability to produce ocean wind measurements in 2009, science suffered from the loss of the data. In the summer of 2012, an opportunity arose to fly a scatterometer instrument on the space station. ISS-RapidScat was the result.
Most scatterometer-carrying satellites fly in what's called a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth. In other words, they cross Earth's equator at the same local time every orbit. The space station, however, will carry the ISS-RapidScat in a non-sun-synchronous orbit. This means the instrument will see different parts of the planet at different times of day, making measurements in the same spot within less than an hour before or after another instrument makes its own observations. These all-hour measurements will allow ISS-RapidScat to pick up the effects of the sun on ocean winds as the day progresses. In addition, the space station's coverage over the tropics means that ISS-RapidScat will offer extra tracking of storms that may develop into hurricanes or other tropical cyclones.
Anywhere the wind blows
"We'll be able to see how wind speed changes with the time of day," said Rodrguez. "ISS-RapidScat will link together all previous and current scatterometer missions, providing us with a more complete picture of how ocean winds change. Combined with data from the European ASCAT scatterometer mission, we'll be able to observe 90 percent of Earth's surface at least once a day, and in many places, several times a day."
ISS-RapidScat's near-global coverage of Earth's ocean -- within the space station's orbit inclination of 51.6 degrees north and south of the equator -- will make it an important tool for scientists who observe and predict Earth's weather. "Frequent observations of the winds over the ocean are used by meteorologists to improve weather and hurricane forecasts and by the operational weather communities to improve numerical weather models," said Rodrguez.
Space-based scatterometer instruments have been built before, but much of what makes ISS-RapidScat unusual is how it came to be. "Space Station Program Manager Michael Suffredini offered us a mounting location on the space station and a free ride on a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply mission launching in early 2014," explained Howard Eisen, the ISS-RapidScat project manager at JPL. "So we had about 18 months to put together an entire mission."
This accelerated timeline is a blink of an eye at NASA, where the typical project is years or decades in the making.
Free ride
Next, Eisen and his team turned to getting creative and crafty with the mission's hardware. In lieu of using newly-designed instruments, which would be expensive and take too long to develop, ISS-RapidScat reuses leftover hardware originally built to test parts of the QuikScat mission. That process involved dusting off and testing pieces of equipment that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1990s. Fortunately the old hardware seems ship-shape and ready to go. "Even though they were spares, they've done an excellent job so far," said Simon Collins, ISS-RapidScat's instrument manager at JPL. Despite their age, the old parts are more than capable of collecting the ocean wind data that ISS-RapidScat need to be a success.
In addition to old spare parts, some new hardware was needed to interface this instrument to the space station and the Dragon spacecraft. ISS-RapidScat will use off-the-shelf, commercially-available computer hardware instead of the expensive, hardened-against-radiation computer chips that are typically used in space missions. "If there's an error or something because of radiation, all we have to do is reset the computer. It's what we call a managed risk," said Eisen. The radiation environment on the space station is much less severe than that experienced en route to Mars, for example, or in more traditional sun-synchronous orbits.
Science bounty
Cost-saving decisions like this are shaping up to make ISS-RapidScat an exceptional bargain of a space mission. "We're doing things differently, and we're trying to do them quickly and cheaply," said Eisen. Considering that the typical launch alone can cost $200 million, ISS-RapidScat's estimated $26 million price tag seems like a bargain. Last year, NASA estimated the cost of a new, free-flying scatterometer satellite mission at approximately $400 million.
The real challenges of getting ISS-RapidScat into space lie in the details. One of the major headaches of such a hurried schedule has been getting the special connectors that will allow ISS-RapidScat to physically attach to the International Space Station. "They're special robotically-mated connectors that haven't been made in years," Eisen said. "We're having to convince the company that produces these connectors to make us a small run in time for the mission, and it hasn't been easy."
The logistics of operating an instrument on the space station are also tricky. "Typically, spacecraft are designed for the instruments they carry," said Collins. "In this case, it's the other way around." For example, ISS-RapidScat's docking point on the space station faces outward toward space - not down toward Earth and the ocean that the instrument is looking at. The space station's flying angle will also change as new pieces are added to it, in response to changes in the station's drag profile. ISS-RapidScat's mount can compensate for both of these challenges.
Another concern the ISS-RapidScat team confronted early on was that one of the space station's docking ports lies squarely within the field of view of the scatterometer. "Bombarding astronauts and visiting supply vehicles with microwave radiation from the instruments was out of the question, and turning the instrument off when there were things docked there would take away too much science," explained Collins. The project's engineers instead devised a plan where the instrument avoids irradiating docking vessels, but continues to scan across the vast majority of its viewing range.
Rodrguez is confident that the reward for overcoming such difficulties will be a bounty of vital science information. "Because it uses much of the same hardware QuikScat did, ISS-RapidScat will allow us to continue the observations of ocean winds already started," said Rodriguez. "Extending this data record will help us observe and understand weather patterns and improve our preparedness for tropical cyclones."
###
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
When you thought we were ready for Google's next announcement, along comes some fresh information, courtesy of regular Google news-breaker, Amir Efrati. He's apparently taken a look at confidential documents outlining what's going on with the next big mobile OS update. The Android KitKat iteration ...
Luscious Jackson has reconvened after more than a decade for its new album, Magic Hour, which comes out Nov. 5.
Doug Seymour/Courtesy of the artist
Luscious Jackson has reconvened after more than a decade for its new album, Magic Hour, which comes out Nov. 5.
Doug Seymour/Courtesy of the artist
"3 Seconds to Cross," a new song by Luscious Jackson, begins somewhere in New York City. The narrator lies awake longing to be in California, though it becomes apparent a New Yorker like her really wouldn't fit in: "It only takes just a little to get yourself lost."
California, we're told, is a land unfriendly to pedestrians, where an L.A. traffic light might give you three seconds to cross the street.
"Well, yeah. You do step off the curb and then it changes to red," says singer-guitarist Gabby Glaser. "And you're just like, 'How can any human being cross the street that fast?'"
Glaser's lyrics suggest her connection to New York — a city where people still walk for miles, or meet people on the sidewalk the way the members of Luscious Jackson once did. The group, known for the hit "Naked Eye," includes Glaser, drummer Kate Schellenbach and singer-bassist Jill Cunniff.
"I think I met Gabby on a stoop on St. Mark's Place, and I believe Kate, as well," Cunniff says.
"We were all about 13, 14, and it was an amazing time, as far as not only bands playing but also the early rap scene and the breakdancing scene," Glaser says. "It was all kind of colliding at the same time."
And in that mix in the early 1980s, the musicians made connections that served them for years.
"I remember meeting Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys in front of the UK Club at a Bad Brains show," says Cunniff. "There were probably 20 of us, all underage, running around to clubs."
In the years that followed, the group would begin playing in clubs themselves, have their songs heard on the radio and sign to the Beastie Boys' label, Grand Royal.
Luscious Jackson's new album, Magic Hour, sounds like a conversation between friends. The band kept that lighthearted feel despite more than a decade off — a time of having kids and trying other careers.
"We're in Brooklyn and we're still making it work," Cunniff says.
The band financed its new album with a pledge drive online. Their crowdfunding brought back a band born in the crowds of New York.
Atherosclerosis in HIV patients linked to infection, not treatment
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Stephanie Berger sb2247@columbia.edu 212-305-4372 Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
Length of infection increases risk for atherosclerosis
HIV infection, not antiretroviral therapy (ART), is associated with risk for atherosclerosis in patients with no history of smoking, particularly those infected for eight years or more. Results of the study led by Mose Desvarieux, MD, PhD, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and at the Institut National de la Sant et de la Recherche Mdicale (INSERM), are published in the latest issue of the journal AIDS.
A growing body of literature reports that HIV patients have higher risk for atherosclerotic disease and cardiovascular disease, but it has been unknown whether HIV infection or ART are the responsible factors, and to what extent traditional cardiovascular risk factors, chiefly smoking, are responsible. Previous studies on HIV, ART, and atherosclerosis had included smokers which made it difficult to disentangle the relationship. While previous studies had looked at specific inflammatory markers, none had studied the impact of inflammatory imbalance on atherosclerosis in the context of HIV. The authors hypothesized that the imbalance between pro- and anti-inflammatory markers would matter more for atherosclerosis than specific markers.
To explore the question, the researchers performed a retrospective study of 100 HIV-positive never-smokers for a minimum of 2 years, of whom half had never received ART and half had been treated with ART for at least 4 years, along with 50 HIV-negative controls. They looked for correlations between measures of carotid intima-media thickness, or c-IMTa measure of cardiovascular healthand, in a first, inflammatory imbalance. Statistical adjustments were made for age, hypertension, and diabetes as well as HIV-infected patients with extremely low counts of lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell.
They found levels of c-IMT were significantly elevated in patients who had been infected for eight years or longer, even those not on ART. Longer time with the infection was also associated with weakened anti-inflammatory response profiles, irrespective of the pro-inflammatory response. "Lower anti-inflammatory response has been linked to increased risk for atherosclerosis, pointing to a potential mechanism within the context of HIV," notes Dr. Franck Boccara, professor of cardiology at Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris and a co-author of the study who will be initiating a 4-month sabbatical at Mailman this week.
The study does not determine whether HIV infection is a cause of atherosclerosis, the authors caution.
But it does contribute significantly by the careful choice of never-smokers and the hard-to-attain group of subjects with 2-year long HIV infection who had not yet required ART initiation, thus allowing for the study of HIV-infection alone. "We suggest that larger studies incorporate and validate the importance of inflammatory imbalance in occurrence of atherosclerosis" concludes Dr. Desvarieux, Mailman School associate professor of Epidemiology, who led the transnational multidisciplinary collaboration with scientists at INSERM and the Paris hospital systems.
About 1.1 million Americans live with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Globally, 34 million are infected, according to the World Health Organization.
###
This study was supported by the L'Agence nationale de recherches sur le sida et les hpatites virales (ANRS) (grant number 2007/303); and Sidaction (grant number AI 20). Mose Desvarieux is also the recipient of a Chair in Chronic Disease from the Ecole des hautes tudes en sant publique (EHESP), France. The collaboration was rendered possible by a Contrat d'Interface (to M.D.) between Inserm and Hpital Saint-Antoine. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
About Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
Founded in 1922, Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its over 450 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change & health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with over 1,300 graduate students from more than 40 nations pursuing a variety of master's and doctoral degree programs. The Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers including the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP), and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit http://www.mailman.columbia.edu
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Atherosclerosis in HIV patients linked to infection, not treatment
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Stephanie Berger sb2247@columbia.edu 212-305-4372 Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
Length of infection increases risk for atherosclerosis
HIV infection, not antiretroviral therapy (ART), is associated with risk for atherosclerosis in patients with no history of smoking, particularly those infected for eight years or more. Results of the study led by Mose Desvarieux, MD, PhD, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and at the Institut National de la Sant et de la Recherche Mdicale (INSERM), are published in the latest issue of the journal AIDS.
A growing body of literature reports that HIV patients have higher risk for atherosclerotic disease and cardiovascular disease, but it has been unknown whether HIV infection or ART are the responsible factors, and to what extent traditional cardiovascular risk factors, chiefly smoking, are responsible. Previous studies on HIV, ART, and atherosclerosis had included smokers which made it difficult to disentangle the relationship. While previous studies had looked at specific inflammatory markers, none had studied the impact of inflammatory imbalance on atherosclerosis in the context of HIV. The authors hypothesized that the imbalance between pro- and anti-inflammatory markers would matter more for atherosclerosis than specific markers.
To explore the question, the researchers performed a retrospective study of 100 HIV-positive never-smokers for a minimum of 2 years, of whom half had never received ART and half had been treated with ART for at least 4 years, along with 50 HIV-negative controls. They looked for correlations between measures of carotid intima-media thickness, or c-IMTa measure of cardiovascular healthand, in a first, inflammatory imbalance. Statistical adjustments were made for age, hypertension, and diabetes as well as HIV-infected patients with extremely low counts of lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell.
They found levels of c-IMT were significantly elevated in patients who had been infected for eight years or longer, even those not on ART. Longer time with the infection was also associated with weakened anti-inflammatory response profiles, irrespective of the pro-inflammatory response. "Lower anti-inflammatory response has been linked to increased risk for atherosclerosis, pointing to a potential mechanism within the context of HIV," notes Dr. Franck Boccara, professor of cardiology at Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris and a co-author of the study who will be initiating a 4-month sabbatical at Mailman this week.
The study does not determine whether HIV infection is a cause of atherosclerosis, the authors caution.
But it does contribute significantly by the careful choice of never-smokers and the hard-to-attain group of subjects with 2-year long HIV infection who had not yet required ART initiation, thus allowing for the study of HIV-infection alone. "We suggest that larger studies incorporate and validate the importance of inflammatory imbalance in occurrence of atherosclerosis" concludes Dr. Desvarieux, Mailman School associate professor of Epidemiology, who led the transnational multidisciplinary collaboration with scientists at INSERM and the Paris hospital systems.
About 1.1 million Americans live with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Globally, 34 million are infected, according to the World Health Organization.
###
This study was supported by the L'Agence nationale de recherches sur le sida et les hpatites virales (ANRS) (grant number 2007/303); and Sidaction (grant number AI 20). Mose Desvarieux is also the recipient of a Chair in Chronic Disease from the Ecole des hautes tudes en sant publique (EHESP), France. The collaboration was rendered possible by a Contrat d'Interface (to M.D.) between Inserm and Hpital Saint-Antoine. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
About Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
Founded in 1922, Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its over 450 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change & health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with over 1,300 graduate students from more than 40 nations pursuing a variety of master's and doctoral degree programs. The Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers including the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP), and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit http://www.mailman.columbia.edu
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vwfWnUYPv8n8MBcTDOTUuvPQoEUOATJoZs3E53eAX8koTsyjWrJS5YX2sNpPdzwhegCfhkg4NwjMvBeyGBjIrNnf--qdgOK4D1-u1_ZGA=s0-d){kind=small}
Share
When you thought we were ready for Google's next announcement, along comes some fresh information, courtesy of regular Google news-breaker, Amir Efrati. He's apparently taken a look at confidential documents outlining what's going on with the next big mobile OS update. The Android KitKat iteration ...
Source: