Exploring normal anatomy and physiology. Heart failure--3.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to K Gordon.
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Although most women infected with HIV are intravenous drug users, some contact the virus through sexual contact with IV drug users. To reach at-risk women, public health officials must develop a range of prevention strategies. One approach, skills training, holds promise as a means of altering risk-related sexual behavior. In this study, 91 women methadone patients were pretested and randomly assigned to an information-only control control group or a skills-building intervention group. Skills-building intervention consisted of five sessions of small groups in which participants identified their own high risk sexual behaviors, discussed their negative associations with condoms, and practiced skills which involved asking partners to use condoms. Compared with members of the control group, respondents in the intervention group reported that they initiated discussion of sexual issues with their partners more frequently, felt more comfortable talking with them about safer sex, and reported using and carrying condoms more frequently. The high rates of attendance and program retention by skills-building participants suggest that such groups may be supportive and useful in the design of risk reduction and drug abuse treatment programs. The modest outcomes of this study underscore the difficulty of altering risk behavior but also serve as a basis for future AIDS prevention studies.
The 5alpha-reduced metabolites of testosterone, including dihydrotestosterone, are considered the primary regulators of epididymal function. Two genes encode two 5alpha-reductase isozymes. We examined 5alpha-reductase type 1 and type 2 mRNA tissue distribution and relative abundance in cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) testicular and epididymal tissues using semiquantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). mRNA extracted from monkey tissues including the testis (T) and the proximal caput (PCp), the caput (Cp), the midcorpus (Co), and the distal cauda (Cd) epididymis was reverse transcribed to produce cDNAs. 5alpha-reductase type 1 and 2 cDNAs were subsequently coamplified with the housekeeping gene, cyclophilin, in a PCR spiked with 33P-dCTP. Relative abundance was reported as the cpm ratios of type 1 or type 2/cyclophilin mRNA. Semiquantitative RT-PCR results indicated that type 1 mRNA was most abundant in the testis (0.48 +/- 0.06) and significantly decreased distally along the monkey epididymis (PCp: 0.29 +/- 0.04; Cp: 0.29 +/- 0.04; Co: 0.21 +/- 0.03; Cd: 0.07 +/- 0.01) (P < 0.001). Type 2 mRNA was undetectable in the testis but was present throughout the epididymis at uniform levels (PCp: 1.6 +/- 0.2; Cp: 1.4 +/- 0.3; Co: 1.6 +/- 0.2; Cd: 1.5 +/- 0.2). These data demonstrate that 5alpha-reductase type 1 mRNA is differentially expressed but of low abundance along the nonhuman primate epididymis, whereas 5alpha-reductase type 2 gene expression is uniform.