Health care claims databases maintained by social insurance institutions provide rich and sometimes easily accessible data sources for epidemiological research. Interpreting the registered claims, for example, drug prescriptions, as proxies for the condition of interest, for example, diabetes, they allow for nationwide prevalence estimation. We illustrate a more subtle use of health care claims data in estimating the stage-specific prevalence of chronic kidney disease in the Austrian population with diabetes. The main difficulty was that information on the type of disease (chronic or acute) and information on the stage of disease were only available for small, almost disjoint subsets of the health care claims data. Using high-dimensional regression models, we could combine the information and provide nationwide estimates of the stage-specific prevalence of diabetic chronic kidney disease. Validating our estimates by comparing to other studies, we found the level of agreement satisfying.

中文翻译：

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通过结合来自多个常规数据收集的信息估计糖尿病患者慢性肾病的患病率

由社会保险机构维护的医疗保健索赔数据库为流行病学研究提供了丰富且有时易于访问的数据源。将注册的声明（例如，药物处方）解释为感兴趣的病症（例如糖尿病）的代理，它们允许在全国范围内进行流行率估计。我们说明了在估计奥地利糖尿病人群中慢性肾病的特定阶段患病率时更巧妙地使用医疗保健索赔数据。主要的困难是关于疾病类型（慢性或急性）的信息和关于疾病阶段的信息仅适用于医疗保健索赔数据中几乎不相交的小子集。使用高维回归模型，我们可以结合这些信息并提供全国范围内糖尿病慢性肾病特定阶段患病率的估计值。通过与其他研究进行比较来验证我们的估计，我们发现一致性水平令人满意。