Journal of internal medicine
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Data on long-term cardiovascular outcomes in primary Sjögren's syndrome (PSS) are scarce. ⋯ Patients with PSS had a higher associated rate of incident HF and other cardiovascular outcomes compared with the general population. In individuals with incident HF, a history of PSS was not associated with increased mortality.
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Review
Optimizing the vaginal microbiome as a potential strategy to reduce heterosexual HIV transmission.
Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is a proinflammatory genital condition characterized by high vaginal bacterial diversity and a paucity of Lactobacillus species. BV has been linked to an elevated risk of HIV acquisition among HIV-negative women and of forward HIV transmission to male sex partners among women living with HIV (adjusted hazard ratios of 1.69 and 3.17, respectively), potentially by eliciting genital inflammation in women with BV and their male sex partners. ⋯ More recently, BV treatment strategies incorporating live biotherapeutic lactobacilli have led to sustained optimization of the vaginal microbiome and a decrease in inflammatory biomarkers previously associated with HIV susceptibility. Future studies are urgently needed to evaluate BV treatment strategies that can optimize the vaginal microbiome in the long term through colonization with H2 O2 -producing vaginal lactobacilli and to assess whether vaginal microbiota optimization is able to reduce the risk of HIV transmission.
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Diet is one of the most important exposures that may affect health throughout life span. Investigations on dietary patterns rather than single food components are gaining in popularity because they take the complexity of the whole dietary context into account. Adherence to such dietary patterns can be measured by using metabolomics, which allows measurements of thousands of molecules simultaneously. ⋯ The metabolites reflecting shared features of different healthy food indices form biomarker panels for which specific, targeted assays could be developed. The specificity of such biomarker panels would need to be validated, and proof-of-concept feeding trials are needed to evaluate to what extent the panels may mediate the effects of dietary patterns on disease risk indicators or if they are merely food intake biomarkers. Metabolites mediating health effects may represent novel targets for precision prevention strategies of clinical relevance to be verified in future studies.