Sensitivity and specificity of dementia coding in two Swedish disease registries

The authors investigated the sensitivity and specificity of dementia identification in two Swedish disease registries by using clinical diagnoses from two population-based studies as gold standards. The probability of dementia detected by the Inpatient Discharge Registry was 55% for prevalent patients and 31% for incident patients and was higher than detection by the Cause of Death Registry. Specificity was 98% for the Inpatient Discharge Registry and 100% for the Cause of Death Registry.