Danish researchers map disease mortality
A group of researchers at the National Centre for Register-based Research at Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, has just published the most extensive map of mortality estimates yet, encompassing more than 1,800 diseases. The map can be used to make more accurate assessments of disease mortality and will benefit clinicians and researchers in particular as well as health authorities and policymakers.
“The Danish Atlas of Disease Mortality” has just been published in the recognised medical journal PLOS Medicine. The atlas is based on anonymised registry data on 7.4 million Danes in the period 2000-2018.
Mortality metrics are used in decision-making and when prioritising healthcare resources, but previous studies have typically focused on individual diseases. In addition, previous studies have often looked at relative measures of mortality instead of absolute differences in mortality between people with a disorder and the general population.
“Most previous papers have used relative measures of mortality or crude estimates of life expectancy. In this atlas, we employ a new method that more accurately captures premature mortality for more than 1,800 different health conditions,” says senior researcher at the National Centre for Register-based Research at Aarhus BSS, Oleguer Plana-Ripoll, who has headed the project.
Detailed and accessible data like these allow a fine-grained analysis of the associations between a comprehensive set of disorders and mortality-related estimates, and the findings can guide health research as well as serve as a benchmark to evaluate future health interventions.”
Oleguer Plana-Ripoll, seniorresearcher at The National Centre for Register-based Research
Health registers
The study describes the incidence rates of the disorders, age-of-onset distributions, comparison of mortality estimates for people with the disorder and the general population, as well as life years lost for people with the disorder.
The research group used national health registers to identify people diagnosed with one of the 1,800 different diseases. Detailed and accessible data like these allow a fine-grained analysis of the associations between a comprehensive set of disorders and mortality-related estimates, and the findings can guide health research as well as serve as a benchmark to evaluate future health interventions.
It is important to note that the association between the different disorders and mortality could be explained by other underlying factors associated with both the disorder and mortality, e.g. social inequalities.
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Find “The Danish Atlas of Disease Mortality” here: http://nbepi.com/atlas
Facts
Type of study:
Cohort study based on national health registers.
External funding:
The study was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark through a Niels Bohr Professorship for JM. Oleguer Plana-Ripoll is supported by a Lundbeck Foundation Fellowship (R345-2020- 1588) and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (no. 837180). AP is supported by a grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (no. NNF18OC0031194). The air pollution modelling was partly funded by NordForsk under the Nordic Programme on Health and Welfare project (project: #75007 (NordicWelfAir)). The Danish Big Data Centre for Environment and Health is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation Challenge Programme (grant: NNF17OC0027864). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Conflicts of interest:
One of the co-authors of the study has been involved in projects funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Central Denmark Region and the Danish Epilepsy Association. These studies were conducted independently of this paper.
Link to the scientific article:
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004023
Contact:
Senior researcher Oleguer Plana-Ripoll
National Centre for Register-Based Research, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University.
Phone: +45 87 16 60 34
Email: opr@econ.au.dk