The North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design (NA-ACCORD) began in 2006 as the North American regional representative of the International epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA). Comprised of 25 collaborating cohorts, NA-ACCORD is designed to be widely representative of HIV care in the United States and Canada. Over 200 sites contribute data on over 130,000 HIV-infected and 150, 000 HIV-uninfected participants.

The goals of NA-ACCORD are:

1) To establish a collaboration of North American HIV/AIDS cohorts to address HIV/AIDS research questions that cannot be accomplished through smaller cohorts.

2) To address scientific aims that focus on the failure of antiretroviral therapy, with a special focus on multi-drug resistant virus and its consequences and management.

3) To address additional scientific aims related to events that cannot be as well-studied in smaller cohorts, and emerging issues in HIV clinical care.

4) To develop and apply novel statistical and epidemiological methodology that is applicable to these scientific research initiatives.

5) To collaborate with other regional cohorts of IeDEA to compare results and address questions of inter-regional importance.

This substudy : Cancer, Heart and Kidney disease - Understanding the impact on HIV (CHK-UP on HIV) is undertaken within the NA-ACCORD framework