The hospital register information was linked to the national registers about causes of death in each country to retrieve data about date and cause of death.
The Danish Civil Registration System contains demographic information on all residents of Denmark and was used to retrieve the date of death.
Hospital notes, including general practitioner referral letters, histology reports and patient discharge summaries were examined to retrieve the date of onset of disease defined as the first appearance of symptoms.
Water depths at each site were retrieved from the up-to-date compilation of available MBES data, and the values for some sites are therefore slightly different from those previously reported by Baba et al. (2010, 2013a) aSampling intervals were changed during observation (see text for details) bIncludes unavailable sections cFailed to retrieve data dFailed to retrieve the instrument eNoisy.
Of these study participants, we were able to retrieve the birth dates of 998 mothers (309 cases, 689 controls), and for 547 of these we also retrieved the birth dates of the grandmothers (197 cases, 350 controls).
We attempted to retrieve the exact dates of participants' stroke from medical records, but responses from general practices were limited to approximately 46% of all participants.
Through genealogical research we were able to retrieve the birth dates of 998 mothers (309 cases, 689 controls) and 547 grandmothers (197 cases, 350 controls).
Our BEAST analyses of the simulated datasets returned accurate dates under the RLC clock whereas UCLN invariably failed to retrieve the true date, even within the 95% BCIs.
We also consulted the websites of the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDCC), and the National Institutes of Health to retrieve up-to-date information about EVD and HIV/AIDS.
The web annotation retrieval is comparatively time-consuming, as it directly connects with the above databases to retrieve up-to-date and possibly missing information.
