Approved Research

The relationship between both environmental and individual characteristics and death due to major chronic diseases

Lay summary

Health risk assessment of future disease has a number of applications and is in widespread use among clinicians and the general public. However, most applications have been focused on single disease areas. Predicting death from diverse disease outcomes is complex and influenced by environmental and individual characteristics. In this study, we will explore the relationship between both environmental and individual characteristics and death due to major chronic diseases (cardiovascular, diabetes, pulmonary, dementia, cancers). This will lead to developing a novel and holistic application which can predict risk of death from chronic disease, informing individuals to take preventive measures.

We are now extending the scope of the research to also cover deaths due to COVID-19 in 2020 due the global pandemic. We plan to update our mortality models to explore underlying risk factors and co-morbidities which may increase severity and risk of death from COVID-19.