Since its founding in 2000, Brighton Collaboration has developed more than 80 Brighton Case Definitions for adverse events following immunization (AEFI) and adverse events of special interest (AESI). The case definitions are designed to support vaccine safety studies across the entire lifespan of a vaccine.
You may be wondering:
- How is a Brighton Case Definition unique?
- What do the levels of certainty mean?
- Which situations are and are not covered by Brighton Case Definitions?
- How is a Brighton Case Definition developed, and why is it trusted?
Find answers to these questions and more in our video, Brighton Case Definitions, developed and narrated by Dr. Barbara Law. Dr. Law is a pediatric infectious disease subspecialist who headed Canada’s vaccine safety program from 2004-2015. She is an active member of the Brighton Collaboration and served on the Brighton Science Board as both a member and a chairperson for many years. She currently heads the SPEAC project’s tools and resources work, which includes developing Brighton Case Definitions as well as tools to help apply them. This is the first in a series of videos from the SPEAC project that we look forward to sharing with the broader vaccine safety community.
In the Brighton Case Definitions video, you will learn these key points and more:
- Brighton case definitions are designed to facilitate a harmonized approach to defining vaccine safety events. They are not intended to guide patient treatment.
- Brighton case definitions are unique in that they:
- Provide a framework that can be used to find, identify and classify vaccine safety events
- Are intended for use across all phases of vaccine development, including after licensure, in both high and low-resource settings.
- Enable combining data from studies done by different investigators to maximize learning
- Brighton Case definitions are constructed using a variety of criteria considered most relevant to establishing the diagnosis of a given event.
- The criteria are arranged in up to 3 levels of diagnostic certainty which correlate with how certain you can be that a case is truly a case of a given event. The levels do not specify severity nor do they provide an estimate of the likelihood that the vaccine caused the event.
