Capture-Recapture Estimates of Illicit Drug Abuse in a County in Northern Taiwan

• Main Authors: Shu C. Chiang, 江淑娟
• Other Authors: Wei J. Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/97086525629802066563

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 流行病學研究所 === 91 === Objective. To employ the method of capture-recapture to estimate the size of male heroin/amphetamine abusers and the prevalence of such abuse in Tao-Yuan County in the period from1999 to 2001. Method. Annual list of male subjects were collected from the judicial system (Tao-Yuan Prison) and the medical system (Tao-Yuan Psychiatric Center, Tao-Yuan Veterans Hospital, and Chu-Shai psychiatric Hospital) in Tao-Yuan County, Taiwan from 1999 to 2001. On the basis of the size of overlap and non-overlap, the double-system capture-recapture method was applied to estimate the size of undetected heroin/amphetamine abusers and then the corresponding prevalence in each year. Results. There were 3427, 2914 and 1726 male abusers aged 15 to 54 years identified from 1999 to 2001 annually. Among them, 2816, 2487, and 1501 of those were residents of Tao-Yuan County in the corresponding year, respectively. The estimates of total abusers in the County were 22716 (95%C.I.= 16597-28835), 19066 (95%C.I.= 14425-23706), and 17713 (95%C.I.= 10513-24914) in each year from 1999 to 2001. Meanwhile, the estimates of resident abusers were 16526 (95%C.I.= 12027-21025), 14439 (95%C.I.= 10935-17942), and 15109 (95%C.I.= 8662-21557) in each year from 1999 to 2001. The prevalence of any illicit drug abuse among male residents aged 15-54 years in Tao-Yuan County was 3.10% (95%C.I. 2.67-3.54%), 2.64% (2.31-2.96%), and 2.70% (2.11-3.29%) in each year from 1999 to 2001, respectively. For individual drug types, the prevalence of amphetamine abuse decreased from 2.43% (1999) to 1.81% (2000) and then rebounded to 2.51% (2001), while that of heroin abuse increased steady from 0.29%, 0.33%, to 0.48% in the period with a significantly increasing trend. Conclusion. The method of capture-recapture could estimate the prevalence of illicit drug abuse by using existing data sets that were incomplete by each alone. The prevalence of illicit drug abuse in the male residents of Tao-Yuan County in the past three years appears to persist around 3%, with an increasing trend for heroin abuse.