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HIV stigma contributes to risks for poor health; these risks are exacerbated by additional stigmas of race, gender, sexual orientation, and substance abuse history. As women continue to be infected by HIV and as people with HIV are living longer, their children, most of whom are not HIV infected, are affected by their parent’s HIV status. Children may feel stigma as acutely as their HIV-positive (HIV+) parents, contributing to the children’s vulnerability. Children of HIV+ mothers have more emotional problems, disrupted relationships, and poor school outcomes than those whose mothers are not living with HIV. As we learn about stigma’s impact beyond the individual, we are compelled to respond systemically within families to reduce future generations’ vulnerability to HIV and other risks. Based on a line of inquiry with HIV-affected teens about their stigma experiences, our multidisciplinary team discovered stigma’s impact on our ability, not only to study stigma, but to engage parents and especially their children in services and research. We draw on these findings and the literature on community-based participation to contend that participatory methods have value, not only for research and program development, but in reducing the impact of stigma with our HIV-affected partners. The participatory process is as important to stigma reduction as knowledge and service development outcomes. Participatory methods can expand our potential for breaking the cycle of intergenerational vulnerability by strengthening family skills and capacity and enhancing self-worth so those affected by HIV are empowered to overcome stigma’s impact.

We hear it all the time and know it to be true—HIV does not discriminate based on age, race or ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. This issue explores living with HIV th...

Older HIV-1-seropositive individuals largely have not been investigated with respect to their psychosocial characteristics. In this article, the authors review research reported to date regarding the psychosocial context of this growing subgroup of HIV-1-infected individuals. Specifically, the authors consider the characteristics of mood state, life stressor burden, social support network, and coping strategies that individuals older than 50 years are more likely to adopt in adjusting to HIV-1 infection. The authors also separately consider issues of caregiving burden. Data supporting a theoretically based stressor-support-coping model are presented and related to targeting psychotherapeutic interventions for this age group.

Background Large deletions within CFTR have been estimated to constitute 1–2% pathogenic alleles, but the occurrence could be much higher in classical cystic fibrosis (CF) patients with one mutation detectable by the routine screening/sequencing work-up. Currently, evaluation of major CFTR rearrangements is not included in the mutation analysis for the reproductive partner of a CF patient/carrier. Methods Exon sequencing and Multiplex Ligation-dependent Amplification (MLPA) analyses were used to make a molecular diagnosis of two unrelated CF patients. Long PCR, restriction mapping, cloning, and hot start sequencing were employed to accurately annotate the rearrangement junctions. Results Both patients had a heterozygous single amino acid deletion mutation identified by sequencing, and a heterozygous deletion of CFTR exons 17a and 17b detected by MLPA. Molecular characterization of the rearrangement breakpoints indicated that the two patients had an identical complex c.2988+1616_c.3367+356del3796ins62 change, flanked by a pair of perfectly inverted repeats of 32 nucleotides. Conclusions The c.2988+1616_c.3367+356del3796ins62 complex rearrangement is a recurrent mutation from patients of different ethnic backgrounds. This mutation can be detected through a simple PCR based analysis.