Partial differential equation about the prevalence of a chronic disease in the presence of duration dependency

Abstract: The illness-death model of a chronic disease consists of the states 'Normal', 'Disease' and 'Death'. In general, the transition rates between the states depend on three time scales: calendar time, age and duration of the chronic disease. Previous works have shown that the age-specific prevalence of the chronic disease can be described by differential equations if the duration is negligible. This article derives a partial differential equation (PDE) in the presence of duration dependency. As an important application, the PDE allows the calculation of the age-specific incidence from cross-sectional surveys.