Do Women Really Complain More than Men? Looking at Gastrointestinal Chief Complaints in Boston

The purpose of syndromic surveillance is the early identification of disease outbreaks. Classification of chief complaints into syndromes and the type of statistics used for aberration detection can affect outbreak detection sensitivity and specificity. Few data are available on the relationship between chief complaints and demographics such as gender, age, or race. For example, myocardial infarction in women would be misclassified using definitions based solely on “male” symptoms such as chest pain because women more commonly report neck, jaw, and back pain.

Objective

We evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of a gastrointestinal syndrome group using the Boston Public Health Commission syndromic surveillance system.