Creating tools and resources to learn about disease risk from health data

Utilising population-based disease registry data and control populations from electronic health records to estimate excess rates of disease-specific morbidity and mortality in cardiovascular disease patients

People with heart and circulatory diseases are living longer thanks to improvements in treatment. This means we need to better understand what other long-term conditions they may develop as they grow older (such as cancer). Health data in patient records and disease registries is a valuable resource for researchers to answer key questions about the future disease risk of people diagnosed with heart disease. However, statistical methods that fully exploit this data are relatively underdeveloped. This studentship will bring together data from disease registries, GP records and national death rates to determine whether people with heart failure have an increased risk of other diseases, especially cancer. The student will focus on how best to match patient information from disease registries to information from populations who have not had heart and circulatory disease, also called control populations. This is essential for developing robust methods that can accurately estimate any increased risk. As part of this, the student will explore whether the same answers are obtained if different sources of data are used and how best to analyse the available data. The resulting methods and data on the control populations will represent the first whole country cardio-oncology research platform and will be made freely available, providing an important resource for cancer and cardiovascular researchers interested in understanding risks across the population.