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A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence

BACKGROUND: In malaria serology analysis, the standard approach to obtain seroprevalence, i.e the proportion of seropositive individuals in a population, is based on a threshold which is used to classify individuals as seropositive or seronegative. The choice of this threshold is often arbitrary and...

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Autores principales: Kyomuhangi, Irene, Giorgi, Emanuele
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8725324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34980109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12936-021-04022-4
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author Kyomuhangi, Irene
Giorgi, Emanuele
author_facet Kyomuhangi, Irene
Giorgi, Emanuele
author_sort Kyomuhangi, Irene
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: In malaria serology analysis, the standard approach to obtain seroprevalence, i.e the proportion of seropositive individuals in a population, is based on a threshold which is used to classify individuals as seropositive or seronegative. The choice of this threshold is often arbitrary and is based on methods that ignore the age-dependency of the antibody distribution. METHODS: Using cross-sectional antibody data from the Western Kenyan Highlands, this paper introduces a novel approach that has three main advantages over the current threshold-based approach: it avoids the use of thresholds; it accounts for the age dependency of malaria antibodies; and it allows us to propagate the uncertainty from the classification of individuals into seropositive and seronegative when estimating seroprevalence. The reversible catalytic model is used as an example for illustrating how to propagate this uncertainty into the parameter estimates of the model. RESULTS: This paper finds that accounting for age-dependency leads to a better fit to the data than the standard approach which uses a single threshold across all ages. Additionally, the paper also finds that the proposed threshold-free approach is more robust against the selection of different age-groups when estimating seroprevalence. CONCLUSION: The novel threshold-free approach presented in this paper provides a statistically principled and more objective approach to estimating malaria seroprevalence. The introduced statistical framework also provides a means to compare results across studies which may use different age ranges for the estimation of seroprevalence. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12936-021-04022-4.
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spelling pubmed-87253242022-01-06 A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence Kyomuhangi, Irene Giorgi, Emanuele Malar J Methodology BACKGROUND: In malaria serology analysis, the standard approach to obtain seroprevalence, i.e the proportion of seropositive individuals in a population, is based on a threshold which is used to classify individuals as seropositive or seronegative. The choice of this threshold is often arbitrary and is based on methods that ignore the age-dependency of the antibody distribution. METHODS: Using cross-sectional antibody data from the Western Kenyan Highlands, this paper introduces a novel approach that has three main advantages over the current threshold-based approach: it avoids the use of thresholds; it accounts for the age dependency of malaria antibodies; and it allows us to propagate the uncertainty from the classification of individuals into seropositive and seronegative when estimating seroprevalence. The reversible catalytic model is used as an example for illustrating how to propagate this uncertainty into the parameter estimates of the model. RESULTS: This paper finds that accounting for age-dependency leads to a better fit to the data than the standard approach which uses a single threshold across all ages. Additionally, the paper also finds that the proposed threshold-free approach is more robust against the selection of different age-groups when estimating seroprevalence. CONCLUSION: The novel threshold-free approach presented in this paper provides a statistically principled and more objective approach to estimating malaria seroprevalence. The introduced statistical framework also provides a means to compare results across studies which may use different age ranges for the estimation of seroprevalence. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12936-021-04022-4. BioMed Central 2022-01-03 /pmc/articles/PMC8725324/ /pubmed/34980109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12936-021-04022-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Methodology
Kyomuhangi, Irene
Giorgi, Emanuele
A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
title A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
title_full A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
title_fullStr A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
title_full_unstemmed A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
title_short A threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
title_sort threshold-free approach with age-dependency for estimating malaria seroprevalence
topic Methodology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8725324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34980109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12936-021-04022-4
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