Limitations to current methods to estimate cause of death: a validation study of a verbal autopsy model

Background: Accurate information on causes of death (CoD) is essential to estimate burden of disease, track global progress, prioritize cost-effective interventions, and inform policies to reduce mortality. In low-income settings, where a significant proportion of deaths take place at home or in poorly-resourced peripheral health facilities, data on CoD often relies on verbal autopsies (VAs). Validations of VAs have been performed against clinical diagnosis, but never before against an acceptable gold standard: the complete diagnostic autopsy (CDA). Methods: We have validated a computer-coded verbal autopsy method –the InterVA- using individual and population metrics to determine CoD against the CDA, in 316 deceased patients of different age groups who died in a tertiary-level hospital in Maputo, Mozambique between 2013 and 2015. Results: We found a low agreement of the model across all age groups at the individual (kappa statistic ranging from -0.030 to 0.232, lowest in stillbirths and highest in adults) and population levels (chance-corrected cause-specific mortality fraction accuracy ranging from -1.00 to 0.62, lowest in stillbirths, highest in children). The sensitivity in identifying infectious diseases was low (0% for tuberculosis, diarrhea, and disseminated infections, 32% for HIV-related infections, 33% for malaria and 36% for pneumonia). Of maternal deaths, 26 were assigned to eclampsia but only four patients actually died of eclampsia. Conclusions: These findings do not lead to building confidence in current estimates of CoD. They also call to the need to implement autopsy methods where they may be feasible, and to improve the quality and performance of current VA techniques.