Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
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Trans. R. Soc. Trop. Med. Hyg. · Jul 2006
Multicenter StudyStandardized data collection for multi-center clinical studies of severe malaria in African children: establishing the SMAC network.
The Severe Malaria in African Children (SMAC) network was established to conduct mortality-based trials. Although falciparum malaria kills more than one million children each year, single centers cannot enroll enough patients to detect reductions of 20-30% in mortality rates. Our aim was to quantify and describe severe malaria across a variety of epidemiological settings so that we could design intervention studies with more precise sample size estimates. ⋯ These data provide more accurate estimates of the disease burden of children hospitalized for malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Networks are required to recruit enough patients for mortality-based studies and to encompass the epidemiological diversity of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. SMAC represents the first effort to develop this capacity.