Parkinson disease validation algorithms

The primary objective of this study was to validate two algorithms for the identification of persons with PD using clinical diagnosis as the reference standard on an Italian sample of people with PD. Two algorithms (index tests) applied to health administrative databases (hospital discharge, drug prescriptions, exemptions for medical costs) were validated against clinical diagnosis of PD by an expert neurologist (reference standard) in a cohort of consecutive outpatients. The two algorithms showed high accuracy for identifying patients with PD: one with greater sensitivity 94.2% (95% CI 88.4 – 97.6) and the other with greater specificity 98.1% (95% CI 97.7 – 98.5).