A colaborative research of the groups of Computational Biology and Systems Biomedicine and Economic Evaluation of Chronic Diseases of HRI Biogipuzkoa, has studied the co-occurrence of chronic diseases in the Basque population.
The results have been authored by Mikel Arróspide Elgarresta, Daniela Gerovska, Myrian Soto-Gordoa, María L. Jauregui García, Marisa L. Merino Hernández, Marcos J. Araúzo-Bravo and published in the article “Chronic disease incidence explained by stepwise models and co-occurrence among them“ in the journal of iScience (https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)02041-8).
Multimorbidity is defined as the co-occurrence of two or more chronic conditions in a single patient, with a common occurrence in elderly populations that require complex care and significant amount of resources. Creating mathematical models that help understand the evolution of multiple chronic conditions can facilitate more informed decision-making within the healthcare system.
The study compiled the data from all patients of Osakidetza with multimorbidity between 2014 and 2021. Then, the 19 diseases or conditions used in the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI, an index used to predict the 10-years survival of a patient) diseases were analyzed to calculate the co-occurrence of all pairs of those diseases. Finally, using several mathematical methods, stepwise model, which explains the development of those diseases and the multimorbidity, was constructed.
The main finding of the research was that multimorbidity follows a multistep model with eight steps for males and one more, nine, for females. Additionally to multimorbidity, the incidence-age profiles of six of the CCI diseases follow confidently multistep models and a multistep model better represents diseases with a higher number of steps. Anatomically, diseases associated with the central nervous system have the highest number of steps, followed by those associated with the kidney, heart, peripheral vasculature, pancreas, joints, cerebral vasculature, lung, stomach, and liver.
Among the diseases of CCI, dementia was the one with highest number of steps: 11 steps for both male and females. Those results are consistent with the general genealogy tree model of the neurodegenerative diseases developed by those authors in another work (Genealogy of the neurodegenerative diseases based on a meta-analysis of age-stratified incidence data“ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75014-8), and placing dementia as a CCI disease in the top part of the tree. Interestingly, multimorbidity can be considered as the “condition” that fits best a multistep model compared all 19 diseases of CCI.
Article by Computational Biology and Systems Biomedicine and Economic Evaluation of Chronic Diseases of HRI Biogipuzkoa.
