Comorbidity Analysis According to Sex and Age in Hypertension Patients in China

Abstract

Background: Hypertension, an important risk factor for the health of human being, is often accompanied by various comorbidities. However, the incidence patterns of those comorbidities have not been widely studied.Aim: Applying big-data techniques on a large collection of electronic medical records, we investigated sex-specific and age-specific detection rates of some important comorbidities of hypertension, and sketched their relationships to reveal the risk for hypertension patients.Methods: We collected a total of 6,371,963 hypertension-related medical records from 106 hospitals in 72 cities throughout China. Those records were reported to a National Center for Disease Control in China between 2011 and 2013. Based on the comprehensive and geographically distributed data set, we identified the top 20 comorbidities of hypertension, and disclosed the sex-specific and age-specific patterns of those comorbidities. A comorbidities network was constructed based on the frequency of co-occurrence relationships among those comorbidities.Results: The top four comorbidities of hypertension were coronary heart disease, diabetes, hyperlipemia, and arteriosclerosis, whose detection rates were 21.71% (21.49% for men vs 21.95% for women), 16.00% (16.24% vs 15.74%), 13.81% (13.86% vs 13.76%), and 12.66% (12.25% vs 13.08%), respectively. The age-specific detection rates of comorbidities showed five unique patterns and also indicated that nephropathy, uremia, and anemia were significant risks for patients under 39 years of age. On the other hand, coronary heart disease, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, hyperlipemia, and cerebral infarction were more likely to occur in older patients. The comorbidity network that we constructed indicated that the top 20 comorbidities of hypertension had strong co-occurrence correlations.Conclusions: Hypertension patients can be aware of their risks of comorbidities based on our sex-specific results, age-specific patterns, and the comorbidity network. Our findings provide useful insights into the comorbidity prevention, risk assessment, and early warning for hypertension patients.

Hypertension management based on general practice care in Shanghai, China

“…Up to 46.9% hypertensive patients had at least one comorbidity in 2017 and 31% of them experienced new comorbidities within two years. Through the Chinese National Surveillance System, the most common comorbidity of hypertension was coronary heart disease, with detection rates of 21.71%, while 7.53% had cerebral infarction which ranked fifth [25]. In contrast, the incidence of stroke (22.3%) was particularly high, while coronary heart disease (6.4%) was relatively lower in our study.…”

Prevalence and Risk Factors of Comorbidities among Hypertensive Patients in China

“…To make our investigation more comprehensive, we also analyzed diabetes mellitus 22-24 and hyperlipidemia 20, 25 as hypertension's comorbidities. The reason why those two diseases were chosen as hypertension's major comorbidities was because, just like hypertension, those two diseases were also were considered strong indicating factors of coronary heart disease 26.…”

MorbiNet: multimorbidity networks in adult general population. Analysis of type 2 diabetes mellitus comorbidity

“…Hidalgo et al studied phenotypic networks and found that patients with diseases highly connected tend to die sooner 7 . This tool has been used to identify comorbidity associated with hypertension 8 , chronic pulmonary obstructive disease 9 or mental disease 10 and to compare multimorbidity by gender 11 . Most of the studies used hospital databases to construct the networks.…”