HIV-1 step study.

摘要

Susan Buchbinder and colleagues report the failure of the Merck adenovirus vaccine to prevent HIV-1 infection in the phase lib Step trial.1 There have been calls for a "back to basic science" agenda since the results were announced in September, 2007 The first of the "explanatory" studies has now been published.2 However, basic science explanations for the Step results do not exclude another factor which might have contributed. The possibility of behavioural disinhibition (risk compensation) was examined by Buchbinder and colleagues in the last paragraph of the Results section. However, I feel that the importance of possibly missing such an effect warrants further discussion.