NDLI: Designing verbal autopsy studies

Content Provider	Springer Nature : BioMed Central
Author	King, Gary Lu, Ying Shibuya, Kenji
Abstract	Background Verbal autopsy analyses are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality rates (CSMR) in the vast majority of the world without high-quality medical death registration. Verbal autopsies -- survey interviews with the caretakers of imminent decedents -- stand in for medical examinations or physical autopsies, which are infeasible or culturally prohibited. Methods and Findings We introduce methods, simulations, and interpretations that can improve the design of automated, data-derived estimates of CSMRs, building on a new approach by King and Lu (2008). Our results generate advice for choosing symptom questions and sample sizes that is easier to satisfy than existing practices. For example, most prior effort has been devoted to searching for symptoms with high sensitivity and specificity, which has rarely if ever succeeded with multiple causes of death. In contrast, our approach makes this search irrelevant because it can produce unbiased estimates even with symptoms that have very low sensitivity and specificity. In addition, the new method is optimized for survey questions caretakers can easily answer rather than questions physicians would ask themselves. We also offer an automated method of weeding out biased symptom questions and advice on how to choose the number of causes of death, symptom questions to ask, and observations to collect, among others. Conclusions With the advice offered here, researchers should be able to design verbal autopsy surveys and conduct analyses with greatly reduced statistical biases and research costs.
Related Links	https://pophealthmetrics.biomedcentral.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/1478-7954-8-19.pdf
Ending Page	12
Page Count	12
Starting Page	1
File Format	HTM / HTML
ISSN	14787954
DOI	10.1186/1478-7954-8-19
Journal	Population Health Metrics
Issue Number	1
Volume Number	8
Language	English
Publisher	BioMed Central
Publisher Date	2010-06-23
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Public Health Epidemiology Research Methodology Health Services Research Mean Square Error Verbal Autopsy Symptom Profile Random Measurement Error Individual Death
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health Epidemiology
Journal Impact Factor	3.2/2023
5-Year Journal Impact Factor	3.3/2023

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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