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Methods for estimating the incidence of primary infection in pregnancy: a reappraisal of toxoplasmosis and cytomegalovirus data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2009

A. E. Ades
A. E. Ades
Affiliation:
Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit, Division of Public Health, Institute of Child Health, 30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH
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Summary

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Accurate incidence information is required to plan and evaluate screening programmes which have been proposed for the detection of primary toxoplasmosis and cytomegalovirus infection in pregnancy. Appropriate statistical methods are described for deriving incidence rates and their confidence intervals from three types of data: change in age-specific seroprevalence, seroconversion, and IgM studies. These methods are applied to seven published studies on toxoplasmosis and cytomegalovirus carried out in the UK. In these publications only one estimate of the infection rate per pregnancy was correctly derived, and none were accompanied by confidence intervals. Using the proposed methods, most estimates of the primary toxoplasmosis rate in these studies were between 2·5 and 5·5 per 1000 pregnancies, compared to the 2 per 1000 usually cited. Most cytomegalovirus incidence estimates were between 4 and 10 per 1000 pregnancies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Epidemiology & Infection , Volume 108 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 367 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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