Machine Learning-Driven Prediction of Comorbidities and Mortality in Adults With Type 1 Diabetes

Comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetic kidney disease (DKD) are major burdens of type 1 diabetes (T1D). Predicting people at high risk of developing comorbidities would enable early intervention. This study aimed to develop models incorporating socioeconomic status (SES) to predict CVD, DKD, and mortality in adults with T1D to improve early identification of comorbidities.

Nationwide Danish registry data were used. Logistic regression models were developed to predict the development of CVD, DKD, and mortality within five years of T1D diagnosis. Features included age, sex, personal income, and education. Performance was evaluated by five-fold cross-validation with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and the precision-recall area under the curve (PR-AUC). The importance of SES was assessed from feature importance plots.

Of the 6572 included adults (≥21 years) with T1D, 379 (6%) developed CVD, 668 (10%) developed DKD, and 921 (14%) died within the five-year follow-up. The AUROC (±SD) was 0.79 (±0.03) for CVD, 0.61 (±0.03) for DKD, and 0.87 (±0.01) for mortality. The PR-AUC was 0.18 (±0.01), 0.15 (±0.03), and 0.49 (±0.02), respectively. Based on feature importance plots, SES was the most important feature in the DKD model but had minimal impact on models for CVD and mortality.

The developed models showed good performance for predicting CVD and mortality, suggesting they could help in the early identification of these outcomes in individuals with T1D. The importance of SES in individual prediction within diabetes remains uncertain.