BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Epidemiol.
Sec. Research Methods and Advances in Epidemiology
This article is part of the Research TopicVectors of Change: Transformative insights in EpidemiologyView all articles
Estimation of the transition rates in the illness-death model for chronic diseases from aggregated current status data: A feasibility and simulation study
Provisionally accepted
- Department for Medical Biometry and Epidemiology, Faculty of Health, University Witten / Herdecke, Witten, Germany
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Recently, it has been shown that the transition rates of the illness-death model (IDM) for chronic conditions are related to the age-specific prevalence by a partial differential equation (PDE). Given mortality, the PDE could be used to estimate incidence rates from cross-sectional data. The aim of this article is to extend the IDM and introduce a novel method to estimate the age-specific incidence rate together with the two mortality rates from aggregated current status (ACS) data. By ACS data we mean counts of people in the four states of the extended IDM at different points in time. ACS data stem from epidemiological studies where only current disease status and vital status data need to be collected without following-up people (as, for example, in cohort studies). To demonstrate feasibility of the method, we use a simulation study from the context of diabetes in Germany. Two estimation methods are introduced, a least squares estimator and a maximum likelihood estimator. We find a good agreement between the estimates and the input parameters used to set up the simulation.
Keywords: Prevalence, diabetes, Epidemiology, Study Design, Estimation, differential equations
Received: 23 Aug 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Brinks, Mohammadi Saem and Voß. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ralph Brinks
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