Epidemiologic and spatio-temporal characteristics of hepatitis E in China, 2004-2014 / 中华流行病学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To describe and analyze the epidemiologic and spatio-temporal characteristics of hepatitis E in China from 2004 to 2014.Methods Data on the incidence of hepatitis E in 31 provinces (municipality and autonomous region) from 2004 to 2014,were collected.Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) was applied to decompose the time-series data to accurately describe the trend of hepatitis E incidence.Mathematic model was used to estimate the annual change of incidence in each age group and the whole province.Software ArcGIS 10.1 and SaTScan 9.01 were used to analyze the spatio-temporal clusters.Results During 2004-2014,a total of 245 414 hepatitis E cases were reported in China.The overall incidence showed a slight increase (OR=1.05,95％CI:1.03-1.10).Incidence rates on hepatitis E were discovered different across the provinces,with significant increase appearing in the southern,central and northwestern areas.The highest increase was seen in the elderly,especially in the 65-69 and 70-74 year-olds.Results from the Local spatial autocorrelation analysis showed that the “high-high cluster” was moving from the north to the south and the “low-low cluster” disappeared as time went by.Data from Spatio-temporal scanning showed that there were five spatio-temporal clustering areas across the country.Conclusion The overall incidence of hepatitis E was on the rise from 2004 to 2014,in China,but with differences seen across the areas and age groups.