The Effect of Random Error on Diagnostic Accuracy Illustrated with the Anthropometric Diagnosis of Malnutrition

It is often thought that random measurement error has a minor effect upon the results of an epidemiological survey. Theoretically, errors of measurement should always increase the spread of a distribution. Defining an illness by having a measurement outside an established healthy range will lead to an inflated prevalence of that condition if there are measurement errors.A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted of anthropometric assessment of...