1. Addressing bias in statistical inference based on epidemiological registry data
- Author
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Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Estadística i Investigació Operativa, Gómez Melis, Guadalupe, Plana Ripoll, Oleguer, Gallego Alabanda, Dídac, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Estadística i Investigació Operativa, Gómez Melis, Guadalupe, Plana Ripoll, Oleguer, and Gallego Alabanda, Dídac
- Abstract
Hospital’s registry data is a widely used resource in Nordic countries to estimate parameters of interest in the public health and in epidemiology. This data allows the researcher to have an unbiased representation of the population, since it is collected for all the individuals that visit the hospitals in the country, and it is stored in databases that are available for the researchers. Despite being a powerful tool, this data has some drawbacks that have to be taken into account before making the study. This project aims to expose the problems that arise when hospital’s registers are used for estimating the incidence of a disease, and explain what it is usually done to correct (or partially correct) them. First, we provide an introduction (Chapter 1) where we discuss the importance of getting good estimations to study the incidence of mental disorders, why registers are a powerful tool to make population-wide research and the main problem we encounter in this type of data: the delayed entries. We continue with a summary on the methodologies that will be used during the rest of the project (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3 we develop further the strengths and limitations of using registration data to estimate the incidence of a disease, providing a self-derived theoretical description of the delayed-entries problematic. In this chapter we also include the methodology that it is usually applied to deal with this problematic: the washout-period method, and we relate this methodology with the provided theoretical description. We finish the chapter with an introduction to the history of the registration system in Denmark and its structure. Lastly, we provide a simulation study based on the data of women diagnosed with depression in Denmark. We have simulated a hospital register and studied the incidence in terms of the cumulative incidence function applying the washout period method.
- Published
- 2024