[Prevalence estimate of three dichotomic characteristics by the analysis of pools, with an application for simulation of the joint detection of cocaine, cannabis and alcohol].
In this paper a method is introduced for estimating from analytical results obtained from pools of individual samples, the prevalences of three substances and their associations. The treated data are dichotomic, i.e. presence-absence of every substance in the analyzed pool. In fact, this method is the extension to three characteristics of the PERM (Politomic Erased Respondent Method), of which the previous version considered only two characteristics. Besides the theoretical development of the method, a simulated application to checks for driving under the influence of alcohol, cocaine and cannabis, is reported. The general agreement among the estimates obtained from the analytical results of the pools and those obtained from the results of the individual samples, is close (within few percent points). As expected this agreement improves when the number of analyzed pools increases. The proposed method could find an interesting application in the checks related to road safety, but also in those regarding work safety and sport safety.
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Ambiente e Traumi, Dipartimento Ambiente e Connessa Prevenzione Primaria, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma, Italy. franco.taggi@iss.it
D000437:Alcoholism / Q000453:epidemiology*; D019970:Cocaine-Related Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology*; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D006801:Humans; D002189:Marijuana Abuse / Q000453:epidemiology*; D015995:Prevalence