Age density patterns in patients medical conditions: A clustering approach.

• Main Authors: Fahad Alhasoun, Faisal Aleissa, May Alhazzani, Luis G Moyano, Claudio Pinhanez, Marta C González
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2018-06-01
• Series: PLoS Computational Biology
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC6037375?pdf=render

This paper presents a data analysis framework to uncover relationships between health conditions, age and sex for a large population of patients. We study a massive heterogeneous sample of 1.7 million patients in Brazil, containing 47 million of health records with detailed medical conditions for visits to medical facilities for a period of 17 months. The findings suggest that medical conditions can be grouped into clusters that share very distinctive densities in the ages of the patients. For each cluster, we further present the ICD-10 chapters within it. Finally, we relate the findings to comorbidity networks, uncovering the relation of the discovered clusters of age densities to comorbidity networks literature.