Since its inception, the UCHCC has captured the changing demographics of the HIV epidemic, with over one-third of the cohort being women and close to two-thirds African American. The UCHCC provided us with an opportunity to examine the influence of demographics on participation in HIV treatment trials. We conducted a cross-sectional study of baseline demographic and behavioural, access-to-care, and clinical characteristics for trial Vorinostat and non-trial participants using the UNC CFAR HIV/AIDS clinical cohort. This cohort, comprising HIV-positive

persons (≥18 years old) who receive health care at the UNC Hospital Infectious Disease (ID) clinic, has been described previously [16,17]. Over 95% of the UNC ID clinic population has consented to participate in the UCHCC. Patients who decline participation Selleckchem BIBW2992 in the UCHCC do not differ significantly from those who participate. This study was approved by the Biomedical Institutional Review Board of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For this analysis, the study population comprised

antiretroviral treatment-naïve HIV-positive subjects who received care in the UNC ID clinic between 1996 and 2006, and initiated HAART, defined as any combination of three or more antiretroviral agents or at least one protease inhibitor and one nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor. Subjects were characterized as trial participants if HAART was initiated as part of a treatment trial. Treatment trials included NIH AIDS Clinical Trial Group (ACTG)-supported or industry-sponsored trials and check details may or may not have been randomized, placebo-controlled or blinded. Gender (male/female) and sexual orientation (heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual) were primary and mutually exclusive exposure variables. MSM and bisexual men were placed in one category. However, because there were no homosexual women and MSM is a subset of all men, we specified a joint gender and sexual

orientation variable with three categories (female/heterosexual male/MSM) to clarify interpretation of coefficients in the multivariable regression. Race/ethnicity was categorized as Black or non-Black and this category included White, Hispanic, Native American and other races. Race/ethnicity and sexual orientation were self-reported and based on the subject’s characterization of personal self-identity. Additional variables included Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) categorization of AIDS [18] (excludes subjects with a CD4 count <200 cells/μL if they had no other AIDS-defining illness), insurance status (Medicaid/Medicare, none and private/other), distance travelled from home to the ID clinic, injecting drug use (IDU) as a risk for HIV acquisition, and time from HIV diagnosis to HAART initiation.