Grant: Project Grant

People with type 2 diabetes are at high risk for cardiovascular disease, blindness, kidney failure and amputations. Being able to estimate the risk of these complications for individual patients is important, since it can help them and their doctors choose the most appropriate treatments. For example, patients at the highest risks need aggressive risk factor control and regular screening tests, while those with lower risk may not. Current risk prediction tools used to estimate risk for diabetes patients are not accurate, because they're based on very old data and are not reflective of real patients in the general population. The objective of our project is to develop risk prediction tools to estimate the risk for cardiovascular disease, other complications of diabetes, and death in people with type 2 diabetes. We will also use these tools to develop a computer program that can estimate the long-term risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes complications and death, and the long-term costs of health care. This computer program can be used by governments and other health care decision makers to determine the value of new diabetes treatments. We will use two data sources to conduct our research: databases from the provincial Ministry of Health that include information from many health care sectors, and the full electronic medical charts family physicians' offices. We will link these datasets from Ontario together to create the risk prediction tools. We will apply the tools to similar patient data from Manitoba, to show that the tools are generalizable. We will then use the tools to create the computer program to estimate long-term outcomes and cost.