BACKGROUND The DisMod II model is designed to estimate epidemiological parameters on diseases where measured data are incomplete and has been used to provide estimates of disease incidence for the Global Burden of Disease study. We assessed the external validity of the DisMod II model by comparing modelled estimates of the incidence of first acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in England in 2010 ...

BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a rare chronically debilitating disease. There are few reports on the burden of disease of MS and prevalence in China. The authors intended to estimate disease burden and prevalence of MS in Shandong Province using available epidemiologic data. METHODS Prevalence was calculated using DISMOD II software based on incidence extrapolated from hospitalization ...

This study was designed to estimate the burden of urologic diseases in the Islamic Republic of Iran as a practical method for defining public health priorities. Using World Health Organization guidelines for national burden of disease studies, 6 steps were performed: selecting diseases to include; dynamic modelling of diseases; gathering data about urologic diseases; computing the local disabil...

BACKGROUND Health administrative data are increasingly used to examine disease occurrence. However, health administrative data are typically available for a limited number of years - posing challenges for estimating disease prevalence and incidence. The objective of this study is to estimate the prevalence of people previously hospitalized with an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) using 17 year...

Epidemiology as an empirical science has developed sophisticated methods to measure the causes and patterns of disease in populations. Nevertheless, for many diseases in many countries only partial data are available. When the partial data are insufficient, but data collection is not an option, it is possible to supplement the data by exploiting the causal relations between the various variable...

Epidemiological information of hereditary spherocytosis in China is slight. This systematic review summarizes the number of cases of hereditary spherocytosis reported in China Biology Medicine disc from 1978 to 2013. In total, 2,043 cases were reported in the past 36 years. We describe its distribution from time and space. We also estimate the literature reported prevalence of hereditary sphero...

To test the sensitivity of our model predictions, we consider holdout scenarios where we limit the model to include only data from before a certain year. By comparing our estimates of ACHD cases based on all available data to estimates with progressively less data, we can obtain some indication of how additional data may change our projection going forward. We consider holding out scenarios tha...

Information about the incidence and prevalence of diseases and injuries at the population level is frequently required for benchmarking, for advocacy of particular policies, to assist in setting funding priorities, for monitoring achievements towards internationally accepted goals and targets, and to guide technical strategies and responses. In this issue of the Bulletin (pp. 622–628), Kruijsha...