Childhood non-affective psychoses: Data analysis

The epidemiology of psychosis in children is a story of even smaller numbers than for psychosis in grown-ups. But how much smaller? The short report of Tiffin & Kitchen ¹ on incident cases of schizophrenia in children in 2010–2011 is a well-needed addition to a limited descriptive literature on psychosis in children. I have a couple of points about the analysis, which I feel might clarify the report.

The authors point out at the outset the heuristic that earlier onset cases of a disorder might have a ‘greater loading of causal factors’. This does not seem to be correct – all cases of a given disorder represent the interrelation of a number of risk factors on a causal pathway – it is therefore unclear why earlier cases would represent the culmination of pathways with a greater number of causal factors. The authors may mean that earlier onset psychoses could represent individuals with stronger risk factors for the disorder. However, although this is usually correct for diseases in general, this point rests on the assumption that there is a single underlying outcome under study, which has long been contested. ² Assuming this heterogeneity is related in some way to the clinical heterogeneity of schizophrenia across people of different ages and with different risk factor patterns, this may explain the large number of false positives identified in Tiffin & Kitchen's study.

Second, although the authors present confidence intervals (presumably based on Poisson standard errors), it is important to point out what the intervals are referring to – this study attempts to capture all cases within a surveillance approach, rather than to sample the target population. In this case, the confidence intervals refer to the underlying randomness of the disease process, rather than to the design of the study. ³ Confidence intervals used in this way are not meaningless, but they may not be strictly necessary here – it seems that reporting the crude rate in this type of study is an almost equally informative approach for the purposes of this research. Furthermore, uncertainty about the true rate of the disorder due to random variability (‘error’) in the disease process likely pales in comparison with the systematic error introduced by biases in this design.