Reliability of data on medical conditions, menstrual and reproductive history provided by hospital controls

To assess the reliability of data on medical conditions, and menstrual or r eproductive history, a sample of 294 controls interviewed in hospital betwe en 1989 and 1992 for an Italian case-control study on digestive tract neopl asms was re-interviewed at home during 1993. A high agreement between respo nses at the two interviews (kappa greater than or equal to 0.85) was observ ed for most medical conditions, including diabetes, choletitiasis, hepatiti s, duodenal ulcer, and, among female conditions., uterine fibromas, benign breast disease, hysterectomy and monolateral ovariectomy. For gastric ulcer and parotitis the reliability was less satisfactory (kappa = 0.35 and 0.20 ., respectively). The agreement was high (kappa > 0.80) also for age at men arche, menopausal status, type and age at menopause, number of children., a ge at first pregnancy, age at first and last birth, and spontaneous abortio ns. The agreement was lower for questions on menstrual pattern (kappa = 0.6 8) and induced abortions (kappa = 0.62). Thus, this study indicates that in formation on personal medical conditions, and menstrual or reproductive his tory, provided by hospital controls through an interviewer-administered que stionnaire is satisfactory for the purposes of epidemiological inference, a nd that the interview setting does not substantially influence the recall o f this information. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.