By analysing more than 4000 hospital admission records from patients with and without type 2 diabetes, the researchers produced a 'comorbidity network', mapping patient journeys and development of other conditions.
"It is well known that chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes do not occur in isolation, and have a shared set of causes common to many other diseases and disorders," said study lead author Arif Khan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Complex Systems in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies at the University of Sydney.
His team found that, over time, the prevalence of comorbidities in the group of diabetic patients was almost double that of the non-diabetic patients, indicating entirely different ways of disease progression. They hope the network can help healthcare providers to proactively identify patients at high risk of developing chronic disease.
Listen to Dr Arif Khan’s full interview (in Bangla) with SBS Bangla in the audio player above.
