Ongoing Case Ascertainment: The case ascertainment, validation, eligibility, and
deduplication protocol in SEARCH 3 will be the same as the one used in SEARCH 1 and
2 to ensure continuity and comparability across time and centers. SEARCH 3 will
continue to use the reporting network of clinics and health care providers that was
established previously as the primary approach to case-finding for incident cases of
diabetes for the period 2010-2014. The case ascertainment approach involves existing
validated pediatric diabetes databases, hospital and health plan databases, and other
health care organizations. Center-specific case ascertainment methods are presented in
Section 2.
Case Validation: Cases of diabetes will be validated based on provider reports, medical
record reviews, or self-report of a physician diagnosis of (non-gestational) diabetes. A
physician-diagnosed case of diabetes is established if any of the following criteria are
met: (1) medical record review indicating a physician diagnosis of diabetes, (2) the
diagnosis of diabetes is directly verified by a physician, (3) the physician referred a youth
with diabetes to the study, or (4) the case was included in a clinical database that had a
requirement for verification of diagnosis of diabetes by a physician.
