Rob van Hest Capture-recapture Methods in Surveillance - RePub ...

Summary
Summary
Surveillance is an essential part of infectious disease control. A concern of any
surveillance system is the quality of the data collected, including the degree of
ascertainment of affected individuals. A conventional surveillance system is notification,
but it may contain false-positive cases and is often incomplete for true-positive cases.
Important for the assessment of the quality and completeness of infectious disease
registers is record-linkage, i.e. comparing patient data across multiple registers.
Completeness of notification can then be assessed through capture-recapture analysis, a
technique originally developed for studies of animal abundance.
After a brief introduction to capture-recapture analysis Chapter 1 describes
aspects of tuberculosis under-notification, methods of estimating tuberculosis incidence
and the application and limitations of capture-recapture methods in tuberculosis
surveillance, followed by a summary of published capture-recapture studies in this field.
This chapter then presents the research questions in this thesis: 1) How do the
characteristics of various infectious diseases and their registers in the Netherlands
influence the feasibility and validity of capture-recapture analysis; 2) How do the
characteristics of tuberculosis surveillance systems in different countries influence the
feasibility and validity of capture-recapture analysis and 3) What is the feasibility and
validity of truncated population estimation models in infectious disease surveillance?
Chapter 2 describes the methodology of capture-recapture analysis, addresses the
underlying assumptions and gives the mathematical framework. Alternative truncated
population estimation models, related to capture-recapture analysis, are briefly mentioned.
The chapter continues to describe the application and limitations of capture-recapture
analysis in epidemiological studies and gives a stepwise overview of relevant issues to be
addressed while planning, applying, presenting and evaluating capture-recapture
techniques. In addition to a previous overview of published capture-recapture studies
until 1997, Chapter 3 presents a synopsis of capture-recapture studies on infectious
diseases published between 1997 and 2006.
In the context of the first research question of this thesis Chapter 4 describes a
capture-recapture analysis after record-linkage of three malaria registrations to estimate
the completeness of notification of malaria by physicians and laboratories in 1996. As for
all studies estimating completeness of notification in this thesis, three conventional
infectious disease registers were used: Notifications, Laboratory results and Hospital
admissions. A parsimonious capture-recapture model, reducing bias due to
interdependence between registers, estimated the total number of malaria patients at 774
(95% confidence interval (CI) 740-821) and the completeness of notification at 69.1%
and 40.2% for the laboratories and physicians respectively. We conclude that laboratorybased
notification can considerably increase the number of officially reported malaria
cases in the Netherlands. In order to estimate the incidence and completeness of
notification of Legionnaires’ disease in 2000 and 2001, Chapter 5 describes recordlinkage
and capture-recapture analysis of the three conventional registers. A saturated loglinear
capture-recapture model estimated 1253 Legionnaires’ disease patients (95%CI
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