Illness-Death Model in Chronic Disease Epidemiology: Characteristics of a Related, Differential Equation and an Inverse Problem.

Chronic diseases impose a huge burden for mankind. Recently, a mathematical relation between the incidence and prevalence of a chronic disease in terms of a differential equation has been described. In this article, we study the characteristics of this differential equation. Furthermore, we prove the ill-posedness of a related inverse problem arising in chronic disease epidemiology. An example application for the inverse problem about type 1 diabetes in German women aged up to 35 years is given.