How do diseases evolve in individuals, from birth to death? Researchers analyzed more than 44 million hospital stays to trace these “disease trajectories”, an innovative approach that would make it possible to implement early and personalized care strategies.
“ Multimorbidity, that is to say the presence of two or more diseases in the same patient, is a frequent phenomenonwrite the authors of a new study published in npj Digital Medicine. The current reality of durationduration life expectancy of 100 years leads to a changing burden of multimorbidity and an increase in health care and long-term care costs. » Hence the interest in implementing targeted and personalized preventive measures decades before serious problems arise.
Identify typical disease trajectories
The researchers wanted to comprehensively identify typical disease trajectories across the lifespan, as well as critical points that impact hospital utilization and patient mortality. To do this, they analyzed almost all hospital stays between 2003 and 2014 in Austria, a total of around 44 million stays. The team then developed a new mapping approach of multi-layered disease networks, in order to pinpoint correlations between different diseases in several age groups.
Over a period of 70 years, researchers identified 1,260 different disease trajectories (618 in women and 642 in men). “ On average, one of these disease trajectories includes nine different diagnoses, showing how common multimorbidity is », underlined Elma Dervic of Complexity Science HubHub in Vienna. In certain trajectories, patients present with similar diagnoses in their youth, then evolve towards significantly different clinical profiles. For example, the model shows two typical trajectories for men aged 20 to 29 who suffer from sleep disorders. In a first trajectory, metabolic diseases (type 2 diabetes, obesity and lipid disorders) appear years later. In the second, these are disorders of the movementmovement.
