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In epidemiology, a case fatality risk (CFR) — or case fatality rate, case fatality ratio or just fatality rate — is the proportion of deaths within a designated population of "cases" (people with a medical condition), over the course of the disease. A CFR is conventionally expressed as a percentage and represents a measure of risk. CFRs are most often used for diseases with discrete, limited time courses, such as outbreaks of acute infections.
For example: Assume 9 deaths among 100 people in a community all diagnosed with the same disease. This means that among the 100 people formally diagnosed with the disease, 9 died and 91 recovered. The CFR, therefore, would be 9%. If some of the cases have not yet resolved (either died or recovered) at the time of analysis, this could lead to bias in estimating the CFR.
A mortality rate — often confused with a CFR — is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in a population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time. (For example, a rate of 50 deaths per 10,000 population in a year resulting from diabetes. The mortality rate, therefore, would be 50:10,000 or 5:1,000.)
Technically, CFRs are actually risks (or "incidence proportions") and take values between 0 and 1. They are not rates, incidence rates, or ratios (none of which are limited to the range 0-1). If one wants to be very precise, the term "case fatality rate" is incorrect, because the time from disease onset to death is not taken into account. Nevertheless, the term case fatality rate (and the abbreviation "CFR") is often used in the scientific literature.
- Definitions of case fatality for coronary events in the WHO MONICA Project
- Swine flu: what do CFR, virulence and mortality rate mean?
Death and dying
Advance directives · Autopsy · Assisted suicide · Brain death · Causes of death by rate ·Clinical death · Death anxiety · Death instinct · Euthanasia · Palliative care · Persistent vegetative state · Suicide · Terminal illness · Witholding treatment
Concept of death and adjustment · Death attitudes · Death attitudes in childhood · Death education · Death penalty · Immortality · Infant mortality · Maternal death · Mortality rate · Terminally ill patients ·
|Fields of research|
Biomedical research: Clinical study design / Design of experiments
| Controlled study|
(EBM I to II-1; A to B)
| Observational study|
(EBM II-2 to II-3; B to C)
|Analysis of clinical trials|
|Interpretation of results|
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