Finding the truth: a guide to interpreting HIV clinical trials.

Overview

The complex social, epidemiologic, and pathologic aspects of HIV disease, the variation in the nature of the disease from person to person, and the constantly changing roster of available treatments create intense and often contradictory concerns. Clinical trials are rarely interested only in the study patients, but are designed to enable us to make inferences about a general HIV-infected population. To do this most effectively, we must confirm the internal and external validity of the study. Statistics enable us to generalize from a particular study to the broader population, but the statistical problems arising from AIDS clinical trials are unique and complex.