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Driving when you’re tired raises your risk of getting into an accident. If you think you’re too drowsy to continue driving, pull over and get some rest. But don’t just stop on the side of the road. Get to the nearest hotel, or be sure to stop in a well-lit area, the U.S. National Safety Council advises.

The council offers these additional suggestions to avoid drowsy driving:

• Get plenty of sleep before your trip. Stick to a regular sleep schedule.
• Try not to drive between midnight and 6 a.m.
• Try to take long trips with someone else, and switch drivers regularly.
• Get on the road early in the day, and keep the car nice and cool to help you stay awake.
• Make frequent stops — about every 100 miles or two hours. Walk around, get a little exercise or have a snack.
• Practice good driving posture — head up, shoulders back and knees bent at about a 45-degree angle — to help you stay awake.

Researchers report they were able to block HIV infections in the lab with synthetic proteins that prevented the virus from entering healthy cells.

In the study, researchers developed synthetic molecules that interfered with the ability of a key HIV protein called gp41 to interact with proteins in host cells.

By interrupting the interaction, HIV could not infect the cells, according to the study that appears online Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Interactions among proteins occur as part of biological processes, including infections and tumor growth, the researchers explained.

“There’s a lot of information transfer that occurs when proteins come together, and one would often like to block that information flow,” Samuel Gellman, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a news release from the school.

Past attempts to prevent infection by selectively interfering with protein interactions have had limited success, he said. Most drugs are not effective at blocking protein-to-protein interactions.

Short snippets of proteins, or peptides, have been shown to be somewhat effective, but they are easily broken down by enzymes in the body, according to the news release.

The new synthetic peptide-like molecules overcome that because of a modified structure that enzymes have trouble recognizing.

In the study, the synthetic molecules interacted with gp41 to prevent the virus from infecting host cells. The synthetic molecules were altered to improve their ability to withstand enzyme degradation, yet retained the three-dimensional shape necessary to recognize HIV’s gp41 protein.

“We want to find an alternate language, an alternate way to express the information that the proteins express so that we can interfere with a conversation that one protein is having with another,” Gellman explained.

The idea shows promise in developing treatments for other disease-causing protein interactions as well, including influenza and Ebola virus, Gellman added.

Having a negative, inhibited personality may increase the risk of death among people with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), a Dutch study suggests.

PAD occurs when plaque accumulates in arteries that supply blood to areas of the body other than the heart and brain.

The study included 184 PAD patients, average age 64.8, in the Netherlands. They filled out a personality questionnaire designed to assess their distress, negativity and social inhibition. During four years of follow-up, 16 patients (8.7 percent) died. After adjusting for other factors, the researchers concluded that PAD patients with a distressed personality had a higher risk of death.

“Preliminary evidence suggests that personality traits such as hostility may also be associated with the severity and progression of atherosclerosis [plaque buildup] in patients with PAD,” wrote Annelies E. Aquarius, of Tilburg University, and colleagues. “Another potential individual risk factor in this context is the distressed personality type [type D]. Type D refers to the joint tendency to experience negative emotions and to inhibit self-expression in social interaction.”

The researchers said type D personality is associated with increased activation of the immune system and changes in the body’s stress response system. “Inadequate self-management of chronic disease is a potential behavioral mechanism that may explain the relation between type D personality and poor prognosis in cardiovascular disease,” they noted.

Although patients with peripheral arterial disease often have multiple risk factors for cardiovascular events, the authors said these patients receive “suboptimal” secondary prevention.

“In addition to improving awareness of the traditional medical risk factors in peripheral arterial disease, attention should be given to psychological factors that may have an adverse effect on the clinical course of peripheral arterial disease. The present findings show that screening for type D personality may be especially important in this context,” they concluded.