To the Editor
We are writing to inform the readers and editors of JAMA that we have discovered errors in our article entitled “Proportions of Kaposi Sarcoma, Selected Non-Hodgkin Lymphomas, and Cervical Cancer in the United States Occurring in Persons with AIDS, 1980-2007,” published in the April 13, 2011, issue of JAMA (2011;305[14]: 1450-1459), caused by a programming mistake that occurred while importing data into our statistics program (SAS; SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina).
Specifically, while importing US population data, population counts for people 85 years and older were inadvertently dropped from the analysis. As a result, when we estimated the number of cancers occurring in people without AIDS in the United States, incidence rates were applied only to the population aged 0 to 84 years. We found an additional minor programming error that also affected the size of the US non-AIDS population. This minor error had a negligible effect on the number of cancer cases but has been corrected nonetheless. These errors affect all estimates of cancers occurring among people without AIDS, the percentages of US cases with AIDS, and the figures but did not affect the patterns observed across subgroups or the overall conclusions of our study. Because our errors were limited to the estimation of non-AIDS cases, our previous estimates of cases occurring in people with AIDS were valid.
A correction appears in this issue of JAMA, and the article has been corrected online. We sincerely regret the errors and apologize that they were not identified prior to publication.
Footnotes
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: The author has completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest and none were reported.