Testing Pneumonia Vaccines in the Elderly: Determining a Case Definition for Pneumococcal Pneumonia in the Absence of a Gold Standard.

ABSTRACT: Clinical assessments of vaccines to prevent pneumococcal community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) require sensitive and specific case definitions, but there is no gold standard diagnostic test. To develop a new case definition suitable for vaccine efficacy studies, we applied latent class analysis (LCA) to the results from 7 diagnostic tests for pneumococcal etiology on clinical specimens from 323 elderly persons with radiologically confirmed pneumonia enrolled in the Finnish Community-Acquired Pneumonia Epidemiology study during 2005-2007. Compared with the conventional use of LCA, which is mainly to determine sensitivities and specificities of different tests, we instead used LCA as an appropriate instrument to predict the probability of pneumococcal etiology for each CAP case based on individ

SUBMITTER: Jokinen J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5982705 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature