Improving Cardiovascular Disease Risk Prediction With Machine Learning Using Mental Health Data: A Prospective UK Biobank Study

BackgroundRobust and accurate prediction of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk facilitates early intervention to benefit patients. It is well-known that mental disorders and CVD are interrelated. Nevertheless, psychological factors are not considered in existing models, which use either a limited number of clinical and lifestyle factors, or have been developed on restricted population subsets. ObjectivesTo assess whether inclusion of psychological data could improve CVD risk prediction in a new machine learning (ML) approach. MethodsUsing a comprehensive, long-term UK Biobank dataset (n=375,145), we examined the correlation between CVD diagnoses and traditional and psychological risk factors. An ensemble ML model containing five constituent algorithms [decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, support vector machine (SVM), and deep neural network (DNN)] was tested for its ability to predict CVD risk based on two training datasets: one using traditional CVD risk factors alone, or a combination of traditional and psychological risk factors. ResultsOur ensemble ML model could predict CVD with 71.31% accuracy using traditional CVD risk factors alone. However, by adding psychological factors to the training data, accuracy dramatically increased to 85.13%. The accuracy and robustness of our ensemble ML model outperformed all five constituent learning algorithms. Re-testing the model on a control dataset to predict bone diseases returned random results, confirming specificity of the training data for prediction of CVD. ConclusionsIncorporating mental health assessment data within an ensemble ML model results in a significantly improved, highly accurate, state-of-the-art CVD risk prediction. AUTHOR APPROVALAll authors have seen and approved the manuscript. COMPETING INTERESTSThe authors declare no competing interests. DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENTAll data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper or in the supplementary materials. In addition, we used UK Biobank in this study: www.ukbiobank.ac.uk. FUNDINGNo funding.