Obstructive airway diseases in adults in western Sweden: computational phenotyping and clinical outcomes

Bakgrund:

Current understanding of obstructive airway diseases indicates that they are heterogeneous syndromes, presenting with different distinct phenotypes. Advances in computational methods are helping to make encouraging progress in disease phenotyping. Using these novel tools, we are now able to characterize different clinically germane disease phenotypes.

However, many phenotyping works of obstructive airway diseases in adults have been uncertain due to lack of representativeness of the phenotyped samples and inadequate variable selection. Målsättning:

Based on the West Sweden Asthma Study (WSAS), we will use novel computational methods to identify distinct phenotypes of obstructive airway diseases in adults in west Sweden. We will then assess the stability of the identified phenotypes over a 10-year period and investigate their environmental and genetic determinants. By linking WSAS to national registers, we will investigate the healthcare use trajectories and co-morbidity patterns of the derived phenotypes.

Arbetsplan:

WSAS is a random sample of 16-75-year-old individuals recruited from Vastra Götaland region. It started in 2008 and performed again in 2016, resulting in data for over 42,000 individuals, of which extensive clinical investigations are being carried out for about 9,000 individuals. We will use the Deep Embedding Clustering (DEC) to identify obstructive airway disease phenotypes.

DEC is a recent computational method use for disease phenotyping. Our preliminary data show that it performed better with our data than other approaches. We will collect data on genetic markers of obstructive airway diseases in order to study the genetic difference of the phenotype. Betydelse:

Identifying phenotypes of obstructive airway diseases will greatly contribute to understanding of the biological processes through which these diseases develop. This will help to inform the development of targeted therapy for treating the diseases, taking into account their underlying phenotypes. WSAS provides a unique platform to make important contributions to the field of obstructive airway disease phenotyping.

Being representative of the underlying adult population of west Sweden, our findings can be translated to the general population. By linking to national registers in Sweden to study healthcare use and co-morbidity patterns of the derived phenotypes, this study has real-life clinical relevance.