MEDICAL STATISTICS SUB-GROUP
HDRUK & BHF Data Science Seminar held 13th May 2022 with presentations from Professor Cathie Sudlow and Professor Angela Wood:

SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in 210 million cases of Covid-19 and ~4.5 million deaths worldwide, including >130,000 deaths in the UK (August 2021). Since March 2020 we have used health data from a range of sources for examining, modelling, and reporting disease trends to inform healthcare and public health policies.

Motivated by the public health importance of fully understanding the relation between Covid-19 and cardiovascular disease (CVD), the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Data Science Centre established the CVD-COVID-UK initiative. In partnership with NHS Digital, they have successfully linked and collated electronic health records (EHRs) for the whole population of England for approved research within a secure, privacy protecting environment. The data resource currently includes EHRs from primary care, hospital episodes, intensive care data, death registrations, covid-19 laboratory test results, covid-19 vaccination data, community dispensing data, and specialist cardiovascular registry datasets on over 54 million live people (~96% of the English population). We have conducted initial data curation and descriptive statistics, demonstrating the importance of linking person level data across health settings to maximise completeness of key characteristics and to ascertain cardiovascular events and covid-19 diagnoses.

CVD-COVID-UK aims to understand the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and blood clots in the lungs through analyses of de-identified, linked, nationally collated healthcare datasets across the four nations of the UK. COVID-IMPACT is an expansion of this approach to address research questions looking at the impact of COVID-19 on other health conditions and their related risk factors.

We have used the population-wide resource to examine the consequences of Covid-19 infection on the subsequent risk of vascular diseases. Our findings suggest a ~2-fold higher risk of vascular disease up to at least 6 months after Covid-19 infection; this risk is higher for venous versus arterial events, and amongst individuals with hospitalised versus non-hospitalised Covid-19 infection.

In response to the public health urgency to clarify early reports of thromboses after the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, we rapidly conducted analyses to quantify associations of vaccination with major arterial, venous and thrombocytopenic events. Using the population-wide resource, which included over 46 million adults of whom ~21 million had a first vaccination during the follow-up period of interest, we observed ~2-fold higher risks of intracranial venous thrombosis and thrombocytopenia amongst younger (<70 years) individuals with the astra-zeneca vaccine in comparison to those not vaccinated. This higher risk was not observed amongst older individuals or those with the Pfizer vaccine. We assessed a wide range of other outcomes and confirmed the higher risks were specific only to intracranial venous thrombosis and thrombocytopenia, and observed lower risks of more common vascular events, highlighting the substantial benefits of vaccination.

You can access the HDRUK & BHF Data Science Seminar held 13th May 2022 with presentations from Professor Cathie Sudlow and Professor Angela Wood on the ARC NWC YouTube channel here.