Risk Of Diabetes - Predictive Model Saving Lives

Diabetes spreads like epidemics nowadays. But people usually ignore this fact and put any prevention on the edge of their interest. When they visit a specialist, they often hear an irrevocable verdict - Diabetes Mellitus. Then one thinks: "If only I knew that earlier. I would live healthier, I would sport more, I wouldn't eat so much, etc..." Unluckily, no medicine for Diabetes has been invented yet. Therefore there is so big pressure on prevention.

A question is - how to make prevention really effective? People usually do not read leaflets and common suggestions just go around them. Finally they find an excuse and return to their old lifestyle. On the other hand there are individuals who visit a doctor with every small pain, who care about their possible diseases so much they bug their family and friends almost every day without any real reason. Now I am talking about hypochondriacs.

Our team of scientists and IT specialists created a predictive model (also called data mining or artificial intelligence) for estimating personal diabetes risk. A special attention has been put on making it as simple as possible what concerns the usage. Following attributes are required:
• Country
• Age
• Gender
• Height
• Weight

Pretty easy to collect them, right?

Of course more information (like blood sugar tolerance, body fat, etc.) would be needed for a proper diagnosis, but this is not the purpose of the tool. Let's leave the diagnosis on doctors. It is their job.

The tool's goal is to provide a rough estimation of diabetes risk and a comparison with particular population groups like males per country, females per country, country and world overall. Distribution of diabetics among three age groups per country provides an estimate of how rapidly the chance one gets diabetes grows as one gets older.

Scientists and doctors will probably argue that there are several forms of Diabetes, each of them can have specific symptoms and causes and we cannot mix them. Let's think "out-of-the-box" for a while. Does an ordinary patient care about risk of Diabetes type I vs. Diabetes type II? Of course not. Ordinary people perceive it as one threat. And also our tool provides the answer as the probability of having simply Diabetes.

Last but not least, it is no secret that Diabetes is tightly related to obesity. To utilize the model to a maximum there is also a calculation of how much weight should one lose to belong to a group where we assume a reasonably lower Diabetes probability. Such information can serve as a self-motivator during the weight reduction process.

People often question me about usefulness of the tool. My own experience is that when I have seen my own "prediction", it made me thinking. And surprisingly, few days ago I realized my weight is only 83 kg. (My weight was around 88 kg several months ago.) I didn't do any special exercise and didn't undertake any diet. Did perhaps my subconscious mind consider my diabetes risk and now it is doing everything to avoid it? I don't know...

By: Miroslav Cerny

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About the author: Miroslav Cerny is a consultant, data analyst, quant trader and enterpreneur. Diabetes Risk Assessment tool is available at www.diarisk.com.