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Correspondence
Asthma admissions, smoking bans and administrative databases: author’s response
  1. Michelle Sims1,
  2. Roy Maxwell2,
  3. Anna Gilmore1
  1. 1School for Health, and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, University of Bath, Bath, UK
  2. 2Public Health England, Bristol, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Michelle Sims, Tobacco Control Research Group, Department for Health, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK; m.sims{at}bath.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/thoraxjnl-2013-204371

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    The issue of the potential misclassification within Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data of asthma for another condition such as COPD, or vice versa, raised by Kent et al 1 is an important one and any impact that this may have should be considered. Misclassification with resultant bias is a potential risk of many studies. However, the extent, or direction, to which bias may be introduced to a study that uses the recorded primary diagnosis from nationally collected data to ascertain trends in admissions is difficult to estimate.

    Kent et al’ claim that asthma is misclassified in 9–14% of cases is based on a single study2 using data, which is now at …

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors MS, RM and AG drafted the letter.

    • Funding The original work was undertaken by the University of Bath which received funding from the Department of Health's Policy Research Programme.

    • Competing interests MS and AG are members of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies which receives core funding from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, and the National Institute of Health Research under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration.

    • Disclaimer The views expressed in the publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Department of Health.The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, interpretation of data, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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