Tocque K, Bellis M A, Beeching N J, Davies P D
North West Public Health Observatory, Liverpool John Moores University, 70 Great Crosshall Street, Liverpool, L3 2AB.
Commun Dis Public Health. 2001 Jun;4(2):141-3.
Notification of tuberculosis cases is often incomplete but combining data from several sources can provide a more accurate estimate of the number of cases. Data for the city of Liverpool were collected over an eight-year period from three sources: notifications, microbiological records and in-patient discharge coding data. Capture-recapture (CR) techniques were used to estimate the total number (including unreported cases) of tuberculosis cases in the city. By creating a log-linear model from the pattern of case replication between data sets, a model of best fit was created from which the number of cases present in the population, but not identified in any of the data sets, was estimated. False positive diagnoses were found in 67/516 (13%) of notifications and in 65/241 (27%) of in-patient codings. After excluding these, the total combined number of cases from all data sources was 473. CR methods identified only twelve extra cases (2.5%) making the estimated number of true cases total 485. Of these, in-patient codings identified 36.3%, microbiological records 56.3% and notifications 92.6%. It was concluded that notification of tuberculosis is very complete in Liverpool. Capture-recapture methods can be used to assess completeness of notification data in other settings.
结核病病例通报往往不完整，但整合多个来源的数据能够更准确地估计病例数量。利物浦市的数据是在八年时间里从三个来源收集的：通报、微生物记录和住院患者出院编码数据。采用捕获再捕获（CR）技术来估计该市结核病病例的总数（包括未报告病例）。通过根据数据集之间病例重复模式创建对数线性模型，得出了最佳拟合模型，据此估计了人群中存在但未在任何数据集中识别出的病例数量。在67/516（13%）的通报病例和65/241（27%）的住院患者编码病例中发现了假阳性诊断。排除这些病例后，所有数据源的病例合并总数为473例。CR方法仅识别出另外12例病例（2.5%），使估计的真实病例总数达到485例。其中，住院患者编码识别出36.3%，微生物记录识别出56.3%，通报识别出92.6%。研究得出结论，利物浦的结核病通报非常完整。捕获再捕获方法可用于评估其他情况下通报数据的完整性。
