BACKGROUND National vital event data suggest that cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality rates are lower for American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN) than for the general US population, but these data are disproportionately flawed for AIAN because of racial misclassification. METHODS AND RESULTS Vital event data adjusted for racial misclassification and published by the Indian Health Servic...

Background: A simple sensitivity analysis technique was developed to assess the impact of misclassification and verify observed prevalence differences between distinct populations. Methods: The prevalence of self-reported comorbid diseases in 4,331 women with surgically-diagnosed endometriosis was compared to published clinical and population-based prevalence estimates. Disease prevalence miscl...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is based mainly on clinical evaluation. The reported incidence of misclassification of significant organic diseases in previously diagnosed IBS patients differs between studies. The aim of this study was to examine the incidence and risk factors for the misclassification of significant organic disease [colon cancer, inflammator...

Part of this paper is based on the result obtained in the Master degree thesis of the second author (QH) (Hui, 2011), which was written under the supervision of the first author (TL). The work in Figure 1 and Tables 3b, 4b and 5b is attributed to QH; the remaining work is attributed to TL. QH is grateful to TL who provided him with an invaluable guidance and constant encouragement while he was ...

Misclassification into exposure categories formed from a continuous variable arises from measurement error in the continuous variable. Examples and mathematical results are presented to show that if the measurement error is nondifferential (independent of disease status), the resulting misclassification will often be differential, even in cohort studies. The degree and direction of differential...

OBJECTIVES Hispanics appear to live longer compared to other ethnic groups in the United States. Our main objective was to determine whether data quality biases mortality statistics. We calculated the impact of misclassification of ethnicity on death certificates in order to create adjusted mortality estimates. METHODS We used the National Mortality Follow-Back Survey of 1993 (NMFS) for our a...