Student research project
Supervisor(s): Professor Jonathan Shaw and Professor Dianna Magliano
This project is focused on improving prediction of mortality attributable to diabetes in each country in the world.
Project summary
The Diabetes Atlas is the flagship project of the International Diabetes Federation. The Diabetes Atlas produces a comprehensive report every two years describing the burden of diabetes across the world by reporting the relevant metrics of diabetes burden including prevalence of diabetes,undiagnosed diabetes, impaired glucose tolerance, impaired fasting glycaemia, and also an estimate of deaths attributable to diabetes. Data for the report are taken from the literature, scrutinised and smoothed using statistical models to produce country-specific estimates. The Atlas is a highly respected resource used by governments for planning of health services, advocacy, and understanding diabetes burden.
This project focuses on improving the methodology to estimate how many deaths in each country are attributable to diabetes. Our current method to predict the number of deaths attribute to diabetes is to apply a formula which uses relative risks (RR) of mortality for people with diabetes compared to those without diabetes from each country, along with prevalence of diabetes and population death counts for that country. The RR are sourced from the literature and the prevalence is from the Diabetes Atlas statistical model. However, RR for mortality for diabetes available in the literature are estimated from diabetes registries or administrative data and generally represent RR for people with diagnosed diabetes only, ignoring mortality risk among those with undiagnosed diabetes. The use of RR for diagnosed diabetes overestimates the number of deaths attributable to diabetes. A better approximation of the number of deaths attributable to diaebtes would be to apply a RR which is generated from a population with diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes, but these data have not been captured from the literature. Therefore, the aims of this project are to generate a database of RR for mortality for diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes (by age and sex) for all countries by comprehensively searching of the literature and contacting our collaborators and asking them to calculate RR for mortality for diagnosed diabetes and undiagnosed diabetes. These data can then be used in the Diabetes Atlas model to predict a more accurate number of deaths attributable to diabetes.
This project is suitable for an Honours student and will involve applying various skills and techniques, including statistics and data analysis.