Journal article
Standardizing estimates of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite rate
- Abstract:
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Background
The Plasmodium falciparum parasite rate (PfPR) is a commonly reported index of malaria transmission intensity. PfPR rises after birth to a plateau before declining in older children and adults. Studies of populations with different age ranges generally report average PfPR, so age is an important source of heterogeneity in reported PfPR data. This confounds simple comparisons of PfPR surveys conducted at different times or places.
Methods
Several algorithms for standardizing PfPR were developed using 21 studies that stratify in detail PfPR by age. An additional 121 studies were found that recorded PfPR from the same population over at least two different age ranges; these paired estimates were used to evaluate these algorithms. The best algorithm was judged to be the one that described most of the variance when converting the PfPR pairs from one age-range to another.
Results
The analysis suggests that the relationship between PfPR and age is predictable across the observed range of malaria endemicity. PfPR reaches a peak after about two years and remains fairly constant in older children until age ten before declining throughout adolescence and adulthood. The PfPR pairs were poorly correlated; using one to predict the other would explain only 5% of the total variance. By contrast, the PfPR predicted by the best algorithm explained 72% of the variance.
Conclusion
The PfPR in older children is useful for standardization because it has good biological, epidemiological and statistical properties. It is also historically consistent with the classical categories of hypoendemic, mesoendemic and hyperendemic malaria. This algorithm provides a reliable method for standardizing PfPR for the purposes of comparing studies and mapping malaria endemicity. The scripts for doing so are freely available to all.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
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- Files:
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(Supplementary materials, zip, 393.8KB, Terms of use)
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(Preview, Version of record, bin, 564.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/1475-2875-6-131
Authors
+ Wellcome Trust
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Funding agency for:
- Snow, RW
- Grant:
- 079080
- Programme:
- Principal Research Fellow
+ Wellcome Trust
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Funding agency for:
- Hay, SI
- Grant:
- 079091
- Programme:
- Senior Research Fellowship
+ Wellcome Trust
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/029chgv08
- Funding agency for:
- Guerra, CA
- Grant:
- 076951
+ Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/034thb936
- Funding agency for:
- Guerra, CA
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- Malaria Journal More from this journal
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 131
- Publication date:
- 2007-09-25
- Acceptance date:
- 2007-09-25
- Edition:
- Publisher's version
- DOI:
- ISSN:
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1475-2875
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- UUID:
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uuid:af677b2d-f3f0-4d63-8ec2-ede280cd89e3
- Local pid:
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ora:2414
- Deposit date:
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2008-10-29
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Smith et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2007
- Rights statement:
- © 2007 Smith et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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