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VERIFICATION AND ADJUDICATION

All the health outcomes collected from different sources are processed, checked, and standardised before being integrated into the central database. Since most disease outcomes are chiefly reported by the attending hospitals, the outcomes are typically accurate (e.g. more than 90% of reported stroke diagnoses are confirmed by brain imaging) with no further verification required.

As certain major diseases such as stroke and cancer have a heterogeneous aetiology, the routinely collected information about disease types and main subtypes (e.g. cancer histology) tended to be incomplete so CKB developed and implemented procedures and IT systems to undertake detailed outcome verification and adjudication based on the retrieved medical notes. Currently this work covers (stroke, heart diseases, cancer, and chronic kidney diseases but will be gradually extended to several other diseases (e.g. heart failure). This allows more reliable characterisation of disease types and relevant subtypes (e.g. lacunar ischaemic stroke) beyond that routinely recorded through disease registers.