Validations of verbal autopsies – comment on ‘automated versus physician assignment of cause of death for verbal autopsies: randomized trial of 9374 deaths in 117 villages in India’

Excerpt

Verbal autopsy (VA) is a method for assessing causes of death by interviewing relatives of a diseased person and gathering as much information as possible on the diseases, signs, symptoms, treatments, and circumstances of the death. The gathering of such information can be made by informal interviews or through the use of a questionnaire, and is then treated either by knowledgeable persons (e.g., trained physicians) or by a computer in order to obtain the probable causes of death (underlying, immediate, associated). VA using a standardized questionnaire was first used on a small scale in the 1980s and became popular in the 1990s [1, 2]. From the beginning, the issue of validation was crucial. The reliability of the final assessment of the individual cause of death or of the distribution of deaths by cause are two different, though closely related issues, which require separate interpretations and have different implications. …