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Validation of Obesity Surgery Data in the Swedish National Patient Registry and Scandinavian Obesity Registry (SOReg)

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Abstract

Background and Aim

Swedish health registries are common sources of data for studies on the effects of obesity surgery, and there is a need to assess the quality of data in these registries. The aim of this study was to validate the registration of obesity surgery in the National Patient Registry (NPR) and the Scandinavian Obesity Surgery Registry (SOReg).

Method

We randomly selected 962 out of 8501 registrations of obesity surgery in 2011 from the NPR and SOReg. Registered surgical procedures in the NPR and SOReg were compared to the medical records, and concordance was analyzed by calculating positive predictive value (PPV) with 95 % confidence interval (CI).

Results

We received 938 (98 %) medical records for manual review. The overall PPV for obesity surgery was high in the NPR (PPV 97.0; 95 % CI 95.6–98.4) and even higher in SOReg (PPV 99.7; 95 % CI 99.3–100). Accuracy was higher for gastric bypass surgery than for other types of obesity surgery. Registrations that were misclassified as obesity surgery (n = 44) included reoperations due to complications or reconstruction to normal anatomy after previous obesity surgery (n = 11) and endoscopic procedures (n = 10).

Conclusion

Obesity surgery registrations in the NPR and SOReg have high accuracy and are reliable sources of data to identify patients having undergone obesity surgery. When it is of importance to distinguish between specific surgical procedures, non-gastric bypass surgeries in the NPR should ideally be supplemented with data from other sources.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Erik Wahlström for statistical support and Max Köster for assistance with the study design, both at the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Upper Gastrointestinal Surgery, Department of Molecular medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, Norra Stationsgatan 67, 171 76, Stockholm, Sweden

    Wenjing Tao, Dag Holmberg, Fredrik Mattsson & Jesper Lagergren

  2. Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

    Erik Näslund

  3. Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine and Health, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

    Ingmar Näslund

  4. Section of Gastrointestinal Cancer, Division of Cancer Studies, King’s College London, London, UK

    Jesper Lagergren

  5. Unit of Epidemiology, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

    Rickard Ljung

Authors
  1. Wenjing Tao
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  2. Dag Holmberg
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  3. Erik Näslund
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  4. Ingmar Näslund
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  5. Fredrik Mattsson
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  6. Jesper Lagergren
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  7. Rickard Ljung
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wenjing Tao.

Ethics declarations

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Informed Consent

For this type of study, formal consent is not required.

Funding

The study was funded by the Swedish Research Council (SIMSAM).

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Tao, W., Holmberg, D., Näslund, E. et al. Validation of Obesity Surgery Data in the Swedish National Patient Registry and Scandinavian Obesity Registry (SOReg). OBES SURG 26, 1750–1756 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11695-015-1994-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11695-015-1994-y

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