Dear all,
As clearly stated in the title, I am running an international, retrospective, multicentre, observational study of paediatric patients with vascular complications after liver transplantation. To be eligible for inclusion, they should be transplanted between 1-1-2001 and 1-1-2020, and and diagnosed/treated between 1-1-2001 and 1-1-2021.
Would it be prevalence as we are studying proportion of patients who have developed complications at particular time periods? OR incidence given the fact that these complications are an undesirable events?
Here is an example of our study: doi: 10.1002/lt.26412
Thanks and regards,
Bader.
"Prevalence" is the number of occurrences in the whole population studied. Individual rates could still be subdivided between arterial vs. venous, stenotic vs. thrombotic, whole organ vs. live donor, whatever so longas population size remains adequate for analysis. "Incidence" is the number of NEW events in a population under study. You might check with your institutions' statistician, but I believe incidence is not a retrospective descriptor. Looking back over time for vascular events will give you the PREVALENCE in the (sub)population studied. Finding associations explaining prevalence in your retrospective study (perhaps using analysis of variance) could lead to changes in operative strategy to reduce the incidence of that problem moving forward. For example: suppose the "prevalence" of arterial thrombosis was 5% overall, but 10% with a greater than 4mm diameter mismatch between donor and recipient. Changing surgical technique would hopefully reduce the "incidence" of this complication moving forward. But that's another study...
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