The University of Miami's Division of Adolescent Medicine seeks continued membership in the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions (ATM). Attention to the health of adolescent and young adult populations in the United States is advocatedthroughout the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services'""""""""Healthy People 2010: Understanding and Improving Health"""""""" document, which was coordinated by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. In the report, sections relating directly to the ATN's RFA may be found in focus areas 13 (concerning HIV infection) and 25 (concerning sexually transmitted diseases generally). This Division of the Miller School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics is well equipped to continue as an effective Adolescent Medicine Trials Unit component of the proposed national ATM, having served previously in this capacity. The existent Adolescent Medicine specialty infrastructure here has demonstrated its ability to treat illnesses in this age group effectively, address behavioral processes, recruit research subjects (both HIV-infected and at-risk uninfected), promote retention, assure subject safety, provide high quality data, contribute to the research agenda, facilitate coordinated community efforts, and participate in multi-site processes with other institutions in collegial fashion. The experience here with HIV infection in youth is one of the most longstanding in the nation. Relevance: With worldwide and United States data both demonstrating increasing numbers of young people with HIV infection, it will be important to continue efforts at discerning unique characteristics of the infection in young people, including their reactions to it;searching for improved treatments, including factors correlated with better adherence patterns;studying behaviors that are identified that put young people at increased risk for HIV infection, and then addressing how to change them;developing other effective prevention strategies, including vaccination;and, ultimately, discovering the cure for this devastating process.
