Population size estimation of men who have sex with men through the network scale-up method in Japan.

Background: Men who have sex with men (MSM) are one of the groups most at risk for HIV infection in Japan. However, size estimates of MSM populations have not been conducted with sufficient frequency and rigor because of the difficulty, high cost and stigma associated with reaching such populations. This study examined an innovative and simple method for estimating the size of the MSM population in Japan.

The conditional relative odds ratio provided less biased results for comparing diagnostic test accuracy in meta-analyses.

Objective: Meta-analytic techniques are used to combine the results of different studies that have evaluated the accuracy of a given diagnostic test. The techniques commonly generate values that either describe the performance of a particular test or compare the discriminative ability of two tests. The later has received very little attention in the literature, and is the focus of this article.