Designed a risk calculator for myeloma patients

Ingigerður Sólveig Sverrisdóttir, MAS-student at the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Sölvi Rögnvaldsson, BS-student at the Faculty of Physical Sciences

“Our study was aimed towards building a new risk calculator for people diagnosed with myeloma. We wanted to see how comorbidity influences the prognosis of myeloma patients, and utilise those results to design a new risk calculator that predicts survival prospects in the context of those accompanying diseases,” says Ingigerður Sólveig Sverrisdóttir, MD and Master’s student in applied statistics about a project she worked on with Sölvi Rögnvaldsson, BS-student in applied mathematics, financed through a grant from the Student’s Innovation Fund in the summer of 2016. The project received the Innovation Prize of the President of Iceland in January 2017.

Annually around 26 individuals are diagnosed with myeloma in Iceland, and the average age of patients at diagnosis is around 72. “In picking a treatment for the disease the individual’s capacity to undergo difficult drug treatments must be evaluated. Comorbidity plays a significant role in this evaluation. To assist doctors in picking treatments so called risk calculators are sometimes used, based on statistical models that predict patient prognosis, based on data on comorbidity,” Sölvi explains.

“Currently a thirty year old risk calculator called the Charlson Comorbidity Index. This tool is not without its flaws, and since medicine is constantly advancing the prognosis of individuals with certain diseases has changed in this period. The goal was therefore to design a tailor-made calculator for myeloma patients,” Ingigerður adds.

To design the risk calculator Ingigerður and Sölvi used data on every patient diagnosed with myeloma in Sweden in the years 1990-2013 and their comorbidity. ”This data is unique, covering all the myeloma cases in a whole nation, around 13 thousand individuals. This project will hopefully result in a calculator that can be used into the future,” says Sölvi.

According to Ingigerður research connected to the development of the risk calculator indicates that the survival rates of individuals with myeloma comorbidity have changed significantly in the last thirty years. “This shows that the old calculator, Charlson, is really out-dated. If we are successful the new calculator should help doctors in choosing therapy for myeloma. The calculator would also feature as part of a wider risk assessment process which can calculate with great accuracy the prognosis of patients diagnosed with this malignant disease,” she concludes.  

Supervisor: Sigrún Helga Lund, Associate Professor at the Centre for Public Health.