Background Verbal autopsy (VA) is an indirect method of ascertaining cause
of death from information about symptoms and signs obtained from bereaved r
elatives. This method has been used in several settings to assess cause-spe
cific mortality. However, cause-specific mortality estimates obtained by VA
are susceptible to bias due to misclassification of causes of death. One w
ay of overcoming this limitation of VA is to adjust the crude VA estimate o
f cause-specific mortality fractions (CSMF) using the sensitivity and speci
ficity of the VA tool. This paper explores the application of sensitivity a
nd specificity of VA data obtained from a hospital-based validation study f
or adjusting the effect of misclassification error in VA data obtained from
a demographic surveillance system.
Method Data from a multi-centre validation study of 796 adult VA, conducted
in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Ghana, were used to explore the effect of distri
bution of causes of death in the validation study population and the patter
n of misclassification on the sensitivity and specificity of VA. VA estimat
es of CSMF for six causes (acute febrile illness, diarrhoeal diseases, TB/A
IDS, cardiovascular disorders, direct maternal causes and injures) were obt
ained from a demographic surveillance system in Morogoro Rural District in
Tanzania. These were adjusted for misclassification error by using sensitiv
ity and specificity values of VA obtained from the validation study in a mo
del proposed for correcting the effect of misclassification error in morbid
ity prevalence surveys.
Results Sensitivity and specificity of VA differed between the three valida
tion study sites depending on the distribution of causes of death. These di
fferences were explained by variations in the level and pattern of misclass
ification between sites. When these estimates of sensitivity and specificit
y were applied to data from the demographic surveillance system with a comp
arable structure of causes of death the difference between crude and adjust
ed VA estimates of CSMF ranged from 3 to 83%.
Conclusion Estimates of sensitivity and specificity obtained from hospital-
based validation studies must be used cautiously as a de facto, 'gold stand
ard' for adjusting the misclassification error in CSMF derived from VA. It
is not possible to use sensitivity and specificity estimates derived from a
location-specific validation study to adjust for misclassification in VA d
ata from populations with substantially different patterns of cause-specifi
c mortality.