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Reporting sexual risk behavior for HIV: a practical risk index and a method for improving risk indices
E Susser1, M Desvarieux, K M Wittkowski
1Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA.
Objectives:
As a means of enhancing public health efforts to control sexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), methods were developed to report on risk behavior in a manner that is comparable and widely interpretable.
Methods:
An elementary sexual behavior risk index (the vaginal episode equivalent index) that is in accord with some of the essential knowledge about sexual transmission of HIV is described, and a multivariate ordinal risk (MOR) method that can be used to improve such risk indices is introduced.
Results:
An example shows that these approaches are applicable to observational studies of seroconversion.
Conclusions:
The MOR represents a powerful new tool to develop valid comparable measures of sexual risk behavior and, thereby, to advance HIV prevention research.