Validity of a Minimally Invasive Autopsy for Cause of Death Determination in Adults in Mozambique: An Observational Study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

There is an urgent need to identify tools able to provide reliable information on the cause of death in low-income regions, since current methods (verbal autopsy, clinical records, and complete autopsies) are either inaccurate, not feasible, or poorly accepted. We aimed to compare the performance of a standardized minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) approach with that of the gold standard, the complete diagnostic autopsy (CDA), in a series of adults who died at Maputo Central Hospital in Mozambique.

Methods and findings

In this observational study, coupled MIAs and CDAs were performed in 112 deceased patients. The MIA analyses were done blindly, without knowledge of the clinical data or the results of the CDA. We compared the MIA diagnosis with the CDA diagnosis of c

SUBMITTER: Castillo P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5119723 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature