Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 26, 2026

Amplifying and Quantifying HIV-1 RNA in HIV Infected Individuals with Viral Loads Below the Limit of Detection by Standard Clinical Assays
Published on: September 26, 2011
Finding the truth: a guide to interpreting HIV clinical trials
1Cornell Clinical Trials Unit, Weill Medical College, Cornell University, New York, USA.
Abstract:
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.
Related Concept Videos
Clinical Trials
There are four phases in a clinical trial. A phase one...
Clinical Trials: Overview
Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast, controlled...
Hazard Ratio
For example, in a clinical trial evaluating a...
Retrovirus Life Cycles
Accuracy and Errors in Hypothesis Testing
In hypothesis testing, the probability of making a Type I error, denoted as α, is commonly set at 0.05. This significance level indicates a 5% chance...

