Table 2.

Correlation between estimated burden of disease and number of randomised controlled trials and enrolled subjects

	All major categories of disease			Infectious disease category
	r*	P value		r*	P value
Burden of disease in 2000 and:
Total No of trials	0.53	0.024		0.85	<0.001
No of trials with n>100	0.64	0.004		0.79	0.001
No of trials with n>500	0.61	0.007		0.78	0.001
Total No of randomised subjects	0.68	0.002		0.25	0.39
Burden of disease in 1990 and:
No of trials before 1990	0.35	0.15		0.67	0.009
No of trials before 1990 with n>100	0.61	0.009		0.62	0.018

^*Spearman's correlation coefficient.