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An AIDS prevention program may increase condom use among teenagers even if it does not reduce the rate of sexual activity. A program in Switzerland was designed to promote safe sex for prevention of AIDS, and it included special events and information targeted at young people. A group of 1,359 16- to 19-year-olds was surveyed in 1987 at the beginning of the campaign and a similar group of 817 was surveyed after three years, in 1990. The proportion of sexually active teens was high, approximately 75%, and did not change between 1987 and 1990. Condom use went up, however. Regular use increased from 22% to 34% among boys and from 10% to 27% among girls. Rates of irregular use went up as well. The teens appeared well-informed about AIDS, but condom use rates were still low. Further health promotion efforts should be developed that include the aspect of contraception as well as AIDS prevention., Objective. To measure sexual behavior changes (especially the use of condoms) among adolescents after 5 years of a population-based acquired immunodeficiency syndrome prevention strategy at the national and regional level. Design. Two comparative cross-sectional surveys by self-administered questionnaires were conducted in 1987 and 1990. Setting. Two similar samples of 16- to 19-year-old apprentices. The two samples, 1987 (n = 1359) and 1990 (n = 817), are comparable in terms of sex, age, profession, and location. Results. The percentage of boys who say they are sexually active has remained the same (75%) and has slightly increased among younger girls (65% to 75%, NS). The average number of partners has remained steady for boys and girls. Regular use of any contraceptive device has remained steady among girls (75%) and increased among boys (1987,38%; 1990,54%; P 90%), followed by the pill (50%), withdrawal (20%), and chemicals (5%). Rates were about the same for both sexes. Rates of irregular use of condoms increased among boys and girls (P < .01); regular use of condoms increased among boys (22% to 34%, P < .01) and girls (10% to 27%, P < .001); use of the pill has slightly decreased. Conclusions. During a 5-year period, the Swiss "STOP-AIDS" campaign and local interventions had had no real effect on the rate of sexual activity of apprentices but had had a positive effect on the use of contraception and condoms. The prevention strategy should (and will) be maintained in the future. Pediatrics 1994;93:580-585; adolescents, teenagers, sexuality, sexual behavior, condoms, attitudes, evaluation, prevention, contraception, AIDS, Switzerland.

Data from a study on ambulatory medical care in two Swiss cantons are used to describe the characteristics of consultations delivered to patients 65 years old and over. The differences with younger patients are presented. The elderly generally suffer from different diseases, and their problems are often chronic. Primary care concerns three-quarters of visits. Medical problems are very frequent and important among this population. It is important to know their specific needs in order to adapt medical practice to them and to be aware of the complexity of the aging process in industrialized societies.

Biomarker detection is one of the greatest challenges in Clinical Proteomics. Today, great hopes are placed into tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) to discover potential biomarkers. MS/MS is a technique that allows large scale data analysis, including the identification, characterization, and quantification of molecules. Especially the identification process, that implies to compare experimental spectra with theoretical amino acid sequences stored in specialized databases, has been subject for extensive research in bioinformatics since many years. Dozens of identification programs have been developed addressing different aspects of the identification process but in general, clinicians are only using a single tools for their data analysis along with a single set of specific parameters. Hence, a significant proportion of the experimental spectra do not lead to a confident identification score due to inappropriate parameters or scoring schemes of the applied analysis software. The swissPIT (Swiss Protein Identification Toolbox) project was initiated to provide the scientific community with an expandable multi-tool platform for automated and in-depth analysis of mass spectrometry data. The swissPIT uses multiple identification tools to automatic analyze mass spectra. The tools are concatenated as analysis workflows. In order to realize these calculation-intensive workflows we are using the Swiss Bio Grid infrastructure. A first version of the web-based front-end is available (http://www.swisspit.cscs.ch) and can be freely accessed after requesting an account. The source code of the project will be also made available in near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a method to grid-enable tandem mass spectrometry protein identification. The implemented parallelization strategy embeds the open-source x!tandem tool in a grid-enabled workflow. This allows rapid analysis of large-scale mass spectrometry experiments on existing heterogeneous hardware. We have explored different data-splitting schemes, considering both splitting spectra datasets and protein databases, and examine the impact of the different schemes on scoring and computation time. While resulting peptide e-values exhibit fluctuation, we show that these variations are small, caused by statistical rather than numerical instability, and are not specific to the grid environment. The correlation coefficient of results obtained on a standalone machine versus the grid environment is found to be better than 0.933 for spectra and 0.984 for protein identification, demonstrating the validity of our approach. Finally, we examine the effect of different splitting schemes of spectra and protein data on CPU time and overall wall clock time, revealing that judicious splitting of both data sets yields best overall performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ImmunoGrid is a 3 year project funded by the European Union which began in February 2006 and establishes an infrastructure for the simulation of the immune system that integrates processes at molecular, cellular and organ levels. It is designed for applications that support clinical outcomes such as the design of vaccines, immunotherapies and optimization of immunization protocols. The first phase of the project concentrated on improving and extending current models of the immune system. We are now entering the second phase which will design and implement a human immune system simulator. Since the new models are orders of magnitude more complex than the previous ones, grid technologies will be essential in providing the necessary computer infrastructure. The final phase of the project will validate the simulator with pre-clinical trials using mouse models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eIMRT project is producing new remote computational tools for helping radiotherapists to plan and deliver treatments. The first available tool will be the IMRT treatment verification using Monte Carlo, which is a computational expensive problem that can be executed remotely on a GRID. In this paper, the current implementation of this process using GRID and SOA technologies is presented, describing the remote execution environment and the client. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BLAST is probably the most used application in bioinformatics teams. BLAST complexity tends to be a concern when the query sequence sets and reference databases are large. Here we present BGBlast: an approach for handling the computational complexity of large BLAST executions by porting BLAST to the Grid platform, leveraging the power of the thousands of CPUs which compose the EGEE infrastructure. BGBlast provides innovative features for efficiently managing BLAST databases in the distributed Grid environment. The system (1) keeps the databases constantly up to date while still allowing the user to regress to earlier versions, (2) stores the older versions of databases on the Grid with a time and space efficient delta encoding and (3) manages the number of replicas for each database over the Grid with an adaptive algorithm, dynamically balancing between execution parallelism and storage costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, a major collaboration in Melbourne Australia successfully completed implementing a major medical informatics infrastructure – this is now being used for discovery research and has won significant expansion funding for 2006 - 2009. The convergence of life sciences, healthcare, and information technology is now driving research into the fundamentals of disease causation. Key to enabling this is collating data in sufficient numbers of patients to ensure studies are adequately powered. The Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (MMIM) is a ‘virtual’ research repository of clinical, laboratory and genetic data sets. Integrated data, physically located within independent hospital and research organisations can be searched and queried seamlessly via a federated data integrator. Researchers must gain authorisation to access data, and inform/obtain permission from the data owners, before the data can be accessed. The legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of this health data have been addressed so data complies with privacy requirements. The MMIM platform has also solved the issue of record linking individual cases and integrating data sources across multiple institutions and multiple clinical specialties. Significant research outcomes already enabled by the MMIM research platform include epilepsy seizure analyses for responders / non responders to therapy; sensitivity of faecal occult blood testing for asymptomatic colorectal cancer and advanced adenomas over a 25-year experience in colorectal cancer screening; subsite-specific colorectal cancer in diabetic and non diabetic patients; and the influence of language spoken on colorectal cancer diagnosis, management and outcomes. Ultimately the infrastructure of MMIM enables discovery research to be accessible via the Web with security, intellectual property and privacy addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper documents a series of data integration workshops held in 2006 at the UK National e-Science Centre, summarizing a range of the problem/solution scenarios in multi-site and multi-scale data integration with six HealthGrid projects using schizophrenia as a domain-specific test case. It outlines emerging strategies, recommendations and objectives for collaboration on shared ontology-building and harmonization of data for multi-site trials in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]