Prediction of the risk of morbidity, recurrence and mortality of cardiovascular diseases and cancer: the effect of environmental, clinical and genetic factors

At present, cardiovascular disease and cancer have contributed most of health burden. In the era of population-aging time, full life-cycle health management is becoming the major task of medical experts and policy makers. The UK Biobank, a large-scale cohort study with genetic and imaging data offers extraordinary opportunities to learn the following two questions: First, are there casual and modifiable risk factors that can protect us from the recurrence and mortality of cardiovascular diseases and cancer? Second, cardiovascular disease could bring with morbidities, recurrence and mortalities. Some of them is easy to be ignored in the clinical. How to detect and prevent them?
Generalized mixed linear models would be used to learn the risk factors. Furthermore, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and Mendelian Randomization would be further used to explore if the risk factors is causal and modifiable. An automatic pipeline analyzing the MR data could provide objective evidence for the above findings and develop new predictors. At last, random forest and Bayesian network would establish prediction models.
Study on both genes and environmental exposures would provide strong evidence to clarify the relationship between various exposures and disease. Causal findings may find novel pathways for disease prevention, treatment and detection of morbidities. This is of great significance to provide the scientific suggestions in preventing from the cardiovascular diseases and cancer, improve the prognosis of those patients and at last decrease the health burden as far as possible. Additionally, we may also provide new analytical strategies and methods, which may have some application values for further research.
We intend to carry out our research with a three-year duration. The findings in this study are expected to provide scientific evidence for the prevention, intervention and care of non-communicable diseases and multimorbidity.