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Comparing the predictive accuracy of health risk appraisal: the Centers for Disease Control versus Carter Center program.

J A Gazmararian, B Foxman, L T Yen, H Morgenstern and D W Edington

School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 48109-2214.

BACKGROUND. From 1986 to 1987 the Carter Center of Emory University joined with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to develop a new, probability-based, adult health risk appraisal (HRA) instrument for the public domain. This new instrument is compared with the CDC HRA version to determine which is a more accurate predictor of mortality. METHODS. We compared predicted mortality risks from the CDC HRA and the Carter Center HRA with the observed mortality among 3135 smokers and never-smoking persons, aged 25 to 60, followed from 1959 to 1979 as part of the Tecumseh Community Health Study. RESULTS. When individuals were classified according to the difference between their actual age and risk age, for the CDC HRA, there was a progressively increasing risk of 10-year mortality as the difference increased. The Carter Center HRA did not show this trend. An analysis using relative operating characteristic curves showed that the mortality risk predictions for both programs were very similar for men and women. However, differences between actual age and risk age for the two programs were not similar for men or women, particularly older men. Therefore, actual age minus risk age for the CDC program was a more accurate predictor of 10-year mortality than was this difference for the Carter Center program. CONCLUSIONS. The results from both types of analyses suggest that the validity of risk ages obtained from the Carter Center version may not be sufficient to justify updating programs for those currently using the CDC instrument.

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