A new method to correct mortality rate biases in HIV treatment programs
Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - 13:51
in Health & Medicine
HIV treatment programs in sub-Saharan Africa should routinely report mortality rates among patients who remain in the programs and those patients lost to follow-up, according to a study by Matthias Egger and colleagues from the International Epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS in East Africa, Western Africa, and Southern Africa that is published in this week's PLoS Medicine. As a substantial proportion of patients in HIV treatment programs are lost to follow-up, mortality estimates for patients in these programs can be severely underestimated, so this bias needs to be taken into account when comparing the effectiveness of different programs...