Cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and diabetes are common conditions that have massive cost impacts for healthcare systems and cause a large number of deaths each year. Many of these deaths are preventable. These health conditions interact, share risk factors, cause damage to other organs, and being diagnosed with one can increase the risk of developing the others. Being able to provide accurate, individual-level risks of developing these conditions, and updating these risk estimations over time could help individuals understand and engage with their health in new ways, but also consider the effects of preventive actions or interventions during the course of their life.
Whilst some tools exist for people to estimate their risks of developing cardiovascular disease, for example, this project seeks to develop a complementary set of new models that can provide accurate information on the risks of these interacting conditions, how these risks evolve over time as people age and change (e.g. develop new health conditions), and can reliably show what the potential effects might be of making lifestyle changes. As people become more interested in at-home medical testing, there is also an opportunity to look into how these data points could also be included in risk tools.
This project seeks to develop a set of new prediction tools using UK Biobank for cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and diabetes. It will then assess how well they perform. We are interested in how these models work ‘overall’, and also how they work in different sub-groups of the population. We expect this project to last up to 24 months, and the results could inform the design of new applications that people can use to understand, track and improve their health.
