Multicentre Inter-cohort Studies – Reliable Responses for HIV Disease Management?

The most recent evidences on HIV infection wereobtained through large multicentre trials/inter-cohortanalyses including patients enrolled by hundreds ofinvestigators and co-investigators around the world.While extensively pooled data are needed to assessinfrequent events (rare toxicities), long-term endpoints,or safety (e.g. mortality or lipodystrophy syndrome),or to perform comparative studies betweendifferent treatments, relevant biases/distortions descendingfrom the extremely elevated number ofenrolling centers/investigators are expected, whilethe reports among quoted co-authors of all investigators/co-investigators supports an unacceptablenumber of presumptive authors. As is known, arelevant number of outstanding multicentre/intercohortstudies signed by thousands of co-authors,comprehensively quoted in all bibliographic databases,have been published in the last months byleading medical journals (starting just from 2008),especially in the attempt to focus on some infrequentHIV disease complications, and regardingefficacy and tolerability of novel antiretroviral therapies(ART). Some representative studies are summarizedin the table.