Towards More Influential Research in Acute Poisoning from Toxic Materials

초록

The standard definition of a disease is an important step for any medical research because the magnitude of disease would produce different number of cases depending on the nature in which a disease is defined. Considering this point, this issue should have been better described if the authors applied only first primary diagnosis code or included secondary diagnosis codes also. More precise definition of acute poisoning can be obtained by combining the diagnosis code with other clinical data rather than applying the code only. Comparing the patients' characteristics with other potentially misclassified diseases is also useful for the estimation of a few possible definitions of a disease.2 The extent of severity of a disease could also be applied for the categorization of disease using the information on treatment type or the duration of hospital stay. These approaches produce a few definitions of a disease based on possible scenarios and provide more solid evidence to figure out the full scope of acute toxic poisoning cases rather than concentrating on a single definition of the disease.

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