Factors influencing reliability of cardiovascular diagnoses

What is it about?

Cardiac diagnoses can be used as clinical outcomes in research studies if they are reliable. In our study, we aimed to understand how different diagnoses-specific factors, like type, subcategories and position affected the diagnostic accuracy. Patients with discharge diagnoses of heart attack, heart failure or stroke were included. We evaluated what percentage of those who received the diagnoses actually had the disease (positive predictive value, PPV).

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Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Cardiovascular discharge diagnoses provides an easy and affordable access for researchers to cardiovascular endpoints. To ensure high-quality science, the included diagnoses must be reliable and accurate. Validation of diagnoses is a highly time-consuming task. Our study found that diagnoses of acute myocardial infarction and stroke had excellent validity when placed during hospital stays, and may be used as endpoints in clinical epidemiological studies with less rigid validation. Thus, other researchers may use our findings to target the validation towards the more uncertain diagnoses. This may save time and resources for fellow researchers in the field. For heart failure and TIA the lower validity will introduce some uncertainty if used as study endpoints, hence validation or additional information supporting the diagnoses is warranted.

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