Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, 1250 N Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, USA.
Stat Med. 2012 Nov 30;31(27):3379-92. doi: 10.1002/sim.5423. Epub 2012 Aug 1.
Prevalence and incidence are two important measures of the impact of a disease. For many diseases, incidence is the most useful measure for response planning. However, the longitudinal studies needed to calculate incidence are resource-intensive, so prevalence estimates are often more readily available. In 1986, Podgor and Leske (Statistics in Medicine, 5:573-578, 1986) developed a model to estimate incidence of a single disease from one survey of age-specific prevalence, even where the presence of the disease increases the mortality rate of patients. Here, we extend their model to the case of progressive diseases, where the incidence of all disease stages is desired. As an example, we consider the case of cataract disease in Africa, where ophthalmologists wish to distinguish between unilateral and bilateral cataract incidence in order to plan the number of cataract surgeries needed to prevent the occurrence of blindness as a result of the disease. Our method has successfully provided cataract incidence estimates on the basis of prevalence data from new Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness surveys in Africa (Lewallen et al., Archives of Ophthalmology, 128(12):1584-1589, 2010). In this paper, we provide a more general form of the model in order to promote its applicability to other diseases.
患病率和发病率是衡量疾病影响的两个重要指标。对于许多疾病来说，发病率是制定应对计划最有用的指标。然而，计算发病率所需的纵向研究需要耗费大量资源，因此患病率估计通常更容易获得。1986 年，Podgor 和 Leske（《医学统计学》，第 5 卷，第 573-578 页，1986 年）开发了一种模型，可根据一次特定年龄组患病率的调查来估计单一疾病的发病率，即使该疾病的存在会增加患者的死亡率。在这里，我们将他们的模型扩展到了进行性疾病的情况，即需要估计所有疾病阶段的发病率。作为一个例子，我们考虑了非洲白内障疾病的情况，眼科医生希望区分单侧和双侧白内障的发病率，以便根据患病率数据来规划所需白内障手术的数量，以预防因该疾病导致的失明。我们的方法已成功地根据非洲新的快速可避免盲症评估调查的患病率数据提供了白内障发病率的估计值（Lewallen 等人，《眼科学档案》，第 128 卷，第 1584-1589 页，2010 年）。在本文中，我们提供了该模型的更一般形式，以促进其在其他疾病中的适用性。
