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Annual meeing of the Population Associaton of America (PAA) 2008 in New Orlenas, LA. April 16-29, 2008
Steve Cohen will be attending the Population Association of America (PAA) 2008 in New Orleans, LA. He has been invited to present his paper “Regional Differences in the Estimation of Influenza Burden in the Elderly: Does Choice of Population Denominator Matter?”
Date: April 16-19, 2008
Time of presentation: Friday, April 18, 10:30AM, session #90.
URL: http://paa2008.princeton.edu/default.aspx
Abstract
Proper estimation of a population denominator is critical to many longitudinal epidemiological studies, though many researchers often overlook this. The objective of this study is to determine the sensitivity of age-specific influenza-related hospitalization rates in the elderly to the choice of four population denominators: decennial census, linearly interpolated from decennial censuses, intercensal estimates, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). We abstracted 14 million hospitalization claims from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for the period 1992-2004 by age and influenza season and applied each of the three denominators to the total hospitalizations by census region, state, and race. We found large discrepancies in the rates using the difference denominators, especially comparing Census 2000 to intercensal estimates. These discrepancies differed by region. Our findings underscore the need to account for population dynamics that may play a role in spatiotemporal disease distribution in longitudinal studies.
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