Obesity Among People Living with HIV

In the U.S., as we move into the holiday season there is often increased reporting on obesity. AIDS.gov asked Dr. Nancy F. Crum-Cianflone, a Research Physician with the Naval Medical Center San Diego, to provide us information on her new study of obesity in HIV-infected persons. Research has shown, HIV-infected persons are now are increasingly overweight or obese. Below is what she told us.

HIV/AIDS Research Gets a Boost through ARRA

By Dr. Carl W. Dieffenbach

Carl W. Dieffenbach, Ph.D

Earlier this year, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 into law to help stimulate the struggling U.S. economy. At the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), part of the NIH, we have used ARRA funds to award high-quality, peer-reviewed grants focusing on research designed to help bring an end to the HIV/AIDS epidemic both by finding new ways to prevent infection and to, hopefully, find a cure.

A critical HIV prevention question is: can we identify the populations at highest risk for infection? Using ARRA funds, NIAID is working to answer this question through two clinical trials designed to determine the feasibility and acceptability of a community level approach to HIV prevention and to estimate HIV incidence among African-American gay and bisexual men and African-American women living in geographical areas with high rates of poverty and HIV infection. The results of these two studies could have a profound impact on the future direction of HIV prevention research in the U.S.

AIDS.gov Introduces New Blog Feature on HIV/AIDS Research

Beginning this week, AIDS.gov is launching a new blog area focusing on the latest developments in HIV/AIDS research from the agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This is just one more way that we hope to use social media as a method for keeping you in tune with what's happening in the fight to end the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Next week, we welcome guest blogger Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. As a leading federal research institute on HIV/AIDS, NIAID supports and conducts international and domestic research designed to better understand the virus and find new and improved HIV treatments and effective ways to prevent HIV infection. In his initial blog post, Dr. Dieffenbach will discuss NIAID’s research agenda for preventing HIV infections here in the United States.