A Factored Co-morbidity Approach for Modelling CKD Progression

Introduction: One of the key challenges in understanding CKD progression is its multifaceted aetiology. This is evident as it is commonly observed that hypertension, heart disease and diabetes are common co-morbidities of CKD. In other words, the existence of co-morbidities can potentially alter the risk of CKD progression, e.g. from stage 3 to 5. Unfortunately, “flat” risk models such as logistic regression, e.g. as implemented by the QKidney score and many similar risk models, are not designed to extract the rich structure induced by a multitude of co-morbidities, the state of which are often captured in routinely collected patient data.