difference between retrospective and prospective

Data on incidence of infections was collected between November 2014 and March 2015 for all household members.

We invited parents of children aged 0–6 years with their whole households for participation. In some of these DCCs, we got permission to invite parents to our study when they came to pick up their children from the DDC or during organisational meetings of the parents in others, we only provided them flyers and these were distributed by the child care workers. Around 50% of the contacted DCCs agreed to participate. Initially, we contacted all DCCs in Braunschweig via a letter and a subsequent call. We conducted a 4 month prospective cohort study in the winter period 2014/2015 and recruited participants in 75 of 151 day care centres (DCCs) in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany. Therefore, the aim of this study was to estimate the incidence of respiratory and gastrointestinal episodes in German households with children attending day care and to compare prospective and retrospective data collection in this setting.

Furthermore, no publications comparing both forms of data collection in households with children are available for ARI. But publications explicitly comparing prospective and retrospective data collection for AGI in the households with children attending day care are scarce. compared the incidence estimates of AGI in their retrospective telephone survey with another study with prospective data collection during the same time period, and found higher incidence estimates in the retrospective data collection for the general population. Besides, loss to follow up is a further disadvantage of prospective studies, which may occur already at 1 month of follow up. Whereas the latter approach may be biased due to recall problems, prospective data collection can be very complex, time consuming, and costly. ĭata on both types of infections can either be collected prospectively or retrospectively. Also, ARI frequency is known to be higher in households with children aged younger than 5 years than in other households. For ARI, an Australian study has reported an incidence of 3.2 cases per person year in the general population. published a systematic review of 33 studies with various designs on incidence of AGI in developed countries and reported an incidence, which varies between 0.1 and 3.2 infections per person year. In consequence, households including children have a higher risk of suffering from infectious diseases, especially in winter seasons. Other household members and especially parents are at risk to frequently acquire these infections from their children. If there is no need to collect biomaterials or data on severity of the diseases, incidence of infections in the household setting over a short time period (2 months) can be assessed retrospectively.Īcute respiratory infections (ARI) and acute gastrointestinal infections (AGI) are the most common childhood infections, and they cause significant burden and costs in the health care system. The adjusted incidence estimates were similar in both study arms for ARI (incidence rate ratio for retrospective versus prospective data collection: 1.11, p = 0.42) as well as for AGI (1.10, p = 0.27). Incidence estimates for ARI (retrospective group: 0.52 per person month, prospective group: 0.47) were higher than for AGI (retrospective group: 0.14, prospective group: 0.13). In total, 100 households (including 404 persons) participated in the retrospective group and 77 households (282 persons) in the prospective group. Poisson regression was used to model monthly incidence rates for both study arms. We applied prospective data collection in one study arm and retrospective data collection with a reporting period of 2 months in the other. For all household members, we collected information on episodes of ARI and AGI. We conducted a 4 months prospective cohort study in the winter period 2014/2015 and recruited parents of children aged 0–6 years in 75 day care centers in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany. The aim of this study was to estimate the incidence of respiratory and gastrointestinal episodes in German households with children attending day care and to compare results of prospective and retrospective data collection. Acute respiratory infections (ARI) and acute gastrointestinal infections (AGI) are the most common childhood infections, and corresponding data can either be collected prospectively or retrospectively.

Difference between retrospective and prospective