Case ascertainment on Australian registers for acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease

Treasure Agenson, Judith M. Katzenellenbogen, Rebecca Seth, Karen Dempsey, Mellise Anderson, Vicki Wade, Daniela Bond-Smith

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    20 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    In Australia, disease registers for acute rheumatic fever (ARF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD) were previously established to facilitate disease surveillance and control, yet little is known about the extent of case-ascertainment. We compared ARF/RHD case ascertainment based on Australian ARF/RHD register records with administrative hospital data from the Northern Territory (NT), South Australia (SA), Queensland (QLD) and Western Australia (WA) for cases 3–59 years of age. Agreement across data sources was compared for persons with an ARF episode or first-ever RHD diagnosis. ARF/RHD registers from the different jurisdictions were missing 26% of Indigenous hospitalised ARF/RHD cases overall (ranging 17–40% by jurisdiction) and 10% of non-Indigenous hospitalised ARF/RHD cases (3–28%). The proportion of hospitalised RHD cases (36%) was half the proportion of hospitalised ARF cases (70%) notified to the ARF/RHD registers. The registers were found to capture few RHD cases in metropolitan areas (SA Metro: 13%, QLD Metro: 35%, WA Metro: 14%). Indigenous status, older age, comorbidities, drug/alcohol abuse and disease severity were predictors of cases appearing in the hospital data only (p < 0.05); sex was not a determinant. This analysis confirms that there are biases associated with the epidemiological analysis of single sources of case ascertainment for ARF/RHD using Australian data.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number5505
    Pages (from-to)1-23
    Number of pages23
    JournalInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
    Volume17
    Issue number15
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2020

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Case ascertainment on Australian registers for acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this