Misclassifications were not limited to Stage IA patients, possibly indicating that errors were not due to test sensitivity.
However, it should be noted that both indices used to stage PD patients are prone to several limitations that may lead to misclassification bias.
ALL: To stage directions!
Since it is relatively easy to stage a patient with an advanced disease (large tumour involving other organs and/or metastasis corresponding to clinical stage IIIb or IV), the risk of misclassification is of minor importance in an advanced disease.
Subcontracting is widespread, and some firms turning to illegal practices such as employee misclassification to remain competitive.
Survival was highest in the USA for Dukes' stage A and B and in Northern Europe Finlandd) for Dukes' stage C and D. This could be due to some misclassification of stage in Finland, where the stage data were not available for 24% of cases.
Some misclassification of stage data may occur, which could result in residual confounding.
Lastly, our staging dichotomy (limited vs. distant stage) may have resulted in misclassification by stage, thereby yielding conservative RS estimates for limited stage disease and optimistic RS estimates for distant stage disease.
Anti-retroviral therapy (ART) coverage for children remains low (Johnson, 2012), due to lack of awareness, misclassification of HIV stage and socio-economic barriers (Feucht, Kinzer, & Kruger, 2007; Meyers et al., 2007; Yeap et al., 2010).
We calculated the proportions of homozygous wild type (AA), heterozygous (Aa) and homozygous mutant (aa) results from the wgaDNA samples that differed from the paired gDNA sample results, and used these to estimate the true misclassification proportion in Stage 2 (see below).
