ArticleInternational journal of epidemiology2017
Defining the population attributable fraction for infectious diseases.
Article in International journal of epidemiology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Economic costs of obesity: a systematic review.International journal of obesity (2005) · 2024Pooled it
- Global Diabetes Prevalence in COVID-19 Patients and Contribution to COVID-19- Related Severity and Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.Diabetes care · 2023Pooled it
- Population Attributable Fraction of Helicobacter pylori Infection-Related Gastric Cancer in Korea: A Meta-Analysis.Cancer research and treatment · 2021Pooled it
- Mortality risk in migrant and non-migrant individuals with chronic hepatitis B virus infection: a French hospital-based cohort study (ANRS CO22 HEPATHER).BMC global and public health · 2025Article
- Latent class analysis identifies risk groups to model the expected benefits of SARS-CoV-2 interventions among university students.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Population attributable fraction of dietary risk factors for cancer mortality with a focus on gastrointestinal cancers in a population based cohort study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Review
- Association of genetic risk and lifestyle with incident adult-onset asthma in the UK Biobank cohort.ERJ open research · 2023Article
- The temporal trend of disease burden attributable to metabolic risk factors in China, 1990-2019: An analysis of the Global Burden of Disease study.Frontiers in nutrition · 2022Article
- The population attributable fraction of cases due to gatherings and groups with relevance to COVID-19 mitigation strategies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Mapping social distancing measures to the reproduction number for COVID-19.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Lifestyle Risk Factors and the Population Attributable Fractions for Overweight and Obesity in Chinese Students of Zhejiang Province.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2021Article
- Increased incarceration rates drive growing tuberculosis burden in prisons and jeopardize overall tuberculosis control in Paraguay.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Intensive care accessibility and outcomes in pandemics.Intensive care medicine · 2020Article
- Global and regional estimates of the contribution of herpes simplex virus type 2 infection to HIV incidence: a population attributable fraction analysis using published epidemiological data.The Lancet. Infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Evaluating the Risk Factors forFrontiers in veterinary science · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Background: The population attributable fraction (PAF) is used to quantify the contribution of a risk group to disease burden. For infectious diseases, high-risk individuals may increase disease risk for the wider population in addition to themselves; therefore methods are required to estimate the PAF for infectious diseases. Methods: A mathematical model of disease transmission in a population with a high-risk group was used to compare existing approaches for calculating the PAF. We quantify when existing methods are consistent and when estimates diverge. We introduce a new method, based on the basic reproduction number, for calculating the PAF, which bridges the gap between existing methods and addresses shortcomings. We illustrate the methods with two examples of the contribution of badgers to bovine tuberculosis in cattle and the role of commercial sex in an HIV epidemic. Results: We demonstrate that current methods result in irreconcilable PAF estimates, depending on how chains of transmission are categorized. Using two novel simple formulae for emerging and endemic diseases, we demonstrate that the largest differences occur when transmission in the general population is not self-sustaining. Crucially, some existing methods are not able to discriminate between multiple risk groups. We show that compared with traditional estimates, assortative mixing leads to a decreased PAF, whereas disassortative mixing increases PAF. Conclusions: Recent methods for calculating the population attributable fraction (PAF) are not consistent with traditional approaches. Policy makers and users of PAF statistics should be aware of these differences. Our approach offers a straightforward and parsimonious method for calculating the PAF for infectious diseases.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.