Background
We assessed the burden of infection-related death at internal medicine departments
in Denmark and the validity of 2 population-based registries for diagnoses of infection.
Methods
We reviewed medical records of all inpatients who died at a large university hospital
during 2008 with an infection diagnosis in the Cause of Death Registry (CDR) or Hospital
Discharge Registry (HDR). We computed the positive predictive value of infection diagnoses
and completeness of each registry with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and the prevalence
of infection-related deaths by capture-recapture analysis.
Results
Among 458 deaths, 193 patients (42.1%) had an infection diagnosis of which 40.0% (183
out of 458) were verified. The positive predictive value of an infection diagnosis
was 96.0% (95% CI, 92.0%-98.3%) in the CDR and 95.3% (CI, 90.9%-97.9%) in the HDR.
Completeness of the CDR was 79.2% (CI, 72.9%-84.6%) and completeness of the HDR was
77.0% (CI, 70.6%-82.7%). By capture–recapture analysis we estimated that 43.2% of
all deaths (198 out of 458) were related to infection.
Conclusions
The large proportion of deaths in internal medicine departments that are related to
infection emphasizes the need for optimized infection prevention and treatment strategies.
CDR and HDR are valid sources for identifying infection and may supplement each other
for increased completeness of infection-related death in epidemiologic research.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 17, 2014
Footnotes
Funding for this investigation was provided by Aalborg University Hospital.
Conflicts of interest: None to report.
Identification
Copyright
© 2014 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
