This Week in PLoS Medicine: Social relationships and mortality; ECG repolarization patterns; Editorial on maternal and child HIV treatment & more

Five new articles have been published this week in PLoS Medicine including three research articles:

In a meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues find that individuals’ social relationships have as much influence on mortality risk as other well-established risk factors for mortality, such as smoking.

In a population-based cohort study of middle-aged people in Central Europe, Stefan Kääb and colleagues find an association between electrocardiographic early repolarization pattern and mortality risk.

William Lockwood and colleagues show that the focal amplification of a gene, BRF2, on Chromosome 8p12 plays a key role in squamous cell carcinoma of the lung.

The Learning Forum section features educational articles about important clinical problems that are relevant to a general medical audience. Rogier van Doorn and colleagues from Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam present a Learning Forum involving three unusual cases of patients with listerial meningitis.

Lastly we offer an editorial in which the PLoS Medicine editors argue that the time has come to integrate prevention and treatment of HIV into maternal and child health care programs.

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