Direct and indirect effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in individuals with cardiovascular disease
Coronavirus (COVID-19) directly impacts individuals who become infected with the virus. It can also influence people’s healthcare decisions (such as deciding not to attend medical appointments for fear of infection). In addition, hospitals have sometimes had to prioritise treatment of COVID-19 patients over routine healthcare.
Access to data from healthcare records will help to improve our understanding of what puts certain people at an increased level of risk. This includes people with cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke.
This research project has three main priorities:
- For people with cardiovascular disease, we will estimate by how much becoming infected or unwell with COVID-19 increases their risk of dying within one year of infection. This will involve analysing routine healthcare data from multiple sources, including from general practices, hospitals and national death registers.
- We will study how the treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease has been affected during the pandemic.
- We will develop and improve models that predict the risk of dying at one year among people with cardiovascular disease who have and who have not contracted COVID-19.
Our research will help to shape health policy, help patients and clinicians to make more informed decisions, and improve health outcomes.
The priorities stated above will be addressed in outputs from a number of related sub-projects. Follow the links below to view repositories containing the protocol, data curation and analysis code, and phenotyping algorithms and codelists for each sub-project:
- CCU003_01: A retrospective cohort study measured predicting and validating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in individuals with chronic kidney disease
- CCU003_03: Using national electronic health records for pandemic preparedness: validation of a parsimonious model for predicting excess deaths among those with COVID-19 – a data-driven retrospective cohort study
- CCU003_04: Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on secondary care for cardiovascular disease in the UK: an electronic health record analysis across three countries
Links to repositories for additional outputs will follow in due course.
This project has been approved by the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT Approvals & Oversight Board (Project ID: CCU003).