A Causal Model for Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: The Health Economic Model for the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease

Abstract

Objectives

Our objective was to design and develop an open-source model capable of simulating interventions for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) that incorporated the cumulative effects of risk factors (eg, cholesterol years or blood-pressure years) to enhance health economic modeling in settings which clinical trials are not possible.

Methods

We reviewed the literature to design the model structure by selecting the most important causal risk factors for CVD—low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C), systolic blood pressure (SBP), smoking, diabetes, and lipoprotein (a) (Lp(a))—and most common CVDs—myocardial infarction and stroke. The epidemiological basis of the model involves the simulation of risk factor trajectories, which are used to modify CVD risk via causal effect estimates derived from Mendelian randomization. LDL-C, SBP, Lp(a), and smoking all have cumulative impacts on CVD risk, which were incorporated into the health economic model. The data for the model were primarily sourced from the UK Biobank study. We calibrated the model using clinical trial data and validated the model against the observed UK Biobank data. Finally, we performed an example health economic analysis to demonstrate the utility of the model. The model is open source.

Results

The model performed well in all validation tests. It was able to produce interpretable and plausible (consistent with expectations of the existing literature) results from an example health economic analysis.

Conclusions

We have constructed an open-source health economic model capable of incorporating the cumulative effect of LDL-C (ie, cholesterol years), SBP (SBP-years), Lp(a), and smoking on lifetime CVD risk.