SURVIVAL ANALYSIS FOR THE RISK OF DEVELOPING HEART ATTACK

Abstract

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among Filipinos, accounting for 1 out of every 5 deaths in the past year. Each year, 170,000 Filipinos die from cardiovascular diseases, up from 85,000 more than 20 y ago. This paper aims to estimate the risk of developing Heart Attack using Survival Analysis. The data were obtained from the records of Quirino Memorial Medical Center with a total of 447 observations. The data includes the time t (patient's age), gender of the patient, covariates such as lifestyle (smoking and drinking alcohol); health conditions (Hypertension, Diabetes, High-density Lipoprotein (HDL) and Low-density Lipoprotein (LDL) level); and family history of Cardiovascular Disease, and the event of interest which is the occurrence of heart attack. The researchers applied two main statistical treatments in examining the data: (1) Cox Regression in formulating a model to estimate the risk of heart attack based on the given covariates; (2) Kaplan-Meier Estimates in calculating the probability of each patient to survive in accordance to their gender depending on the covariates the patients have. Results showed that females have more risks of developing heart attack than males for patients with hypertension, with diabetes, with a family history of CVD, and those who are smoking. However, for patients who are alcoholic, men are more prone to the risk of heart attack than women. The results were obtained with the help of SPSS.