Cardiovascular Disease Patterns in the Framingham Dataset

Do men and women differ in cardiovascular disease frequency and related risk factors in the Framingham dataset?

Introduction

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major cause of illness and death worldwide. Understanding the factors associated with cardiovascular disease is important for prevention and treatment strategies. The data analysed in this report comes from the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term study designed to identify risk factors for CVD.

This report explores differences in CVD between men and women in the dataset. In addition, the relationship between age and blood pressure is examined to provide context for known CVD risk factors.

Data

The dataset was imported into R and explored using basic summary functions. It contains multiple observations collected across examination periods for participants in the Framingham study. Key variables used in this analysis include sex (SEX), cardiovascular disease status (CVD), age (AGE), and systolic blood pressure (SYSBP).

Some missing values occurred which would be due to not all participants attended every examination and some measurements were not recorded for all individuals. Also because some tests were not available in every period, for example HDL and LDL only exist in period 3.

Results

Figure 1 shows the proportion of participants with CVD among men and women. The plot suggests that men have a slightly higher proportion of CVD cases compared with women in this dataset.

Figure 1. Proportion of cardiovascular disease cases in men and women.

Figure 2 shows age distributions by sex. The violin plot demonstrates that both men and women have a wide range of ages within the dataset, with similar overall distributions between the two groups.

Figure 2. Distribution of age by sex

Figure 3 shows the relationship between age and systolic blood pressure using a scatterplot. A general trend can be observed where systolic blood pressure tends to increase with age, which is consistent with known patterns of CVD risk.

Figure 3. Relationship between age and systolic blood pressure

Conclusion

This report looked at patterns of CVD in the Framingham dataset using a number of graphical visualisations. The results suggest that men may have a higher frequency of CVD than women in this sample. Additionally, the scatter plot indicates that systolic blood pressure tends to increase with age, which is an important CVD risk factor.

Overall, these findings are consistent with existing research showing age and sex are important factors associated with CVD risk. Further analysis could investigate additional risk factors such as smoking, cholesterol levels, and diabetes.