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Abstract:
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Population-based estimates of the prevalence of some health conditions require that a subset of the survey sample have a clinical evaluation, in addition to an initial personal interview. Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) provides a motivating example: an interview can elicit whether respondents have the symptoms that are part of the definition of CFS, as well as whether they have exclusionary conditions, but the actual diagnosis of CFS depends on laboratory data and the results of a physical examination and other tests. Thus, all subjects with sufficient symptoms (and no exclusions) are eligible for clinical evaluation, and other subsets of subjects may be selected for comparison. For types of fatiguing illness whose definition involves clinical data, the paper examines two approaches for estimating standard errors of prevalence estimates.
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