Three groups of master's and doctoral students in the Department of Biostatistics submitted research projects for the Eastern North American Region(ENAR) International Biometric Society's inaugural DataFest competition and all three groups won an opportunity to give oral presentations at the ENAR annual meeting in March!
The problem statement for the competition is as stated: Controlling blood pressure (BP) reduces the risk for cardiovascular disease. However, the prevalence of BP control (i.e., systolic BP < 140 and diastolic BP < 90) among US adults with hypertension has decreased since 2013. Teams were invited to analyze publicly available data from US adults to help identify potential causes or correlates of worsening BP control among US adults with hypertension over the past decade, as this may allow for development of effective interventions to help control BP and prevent cardiovascular disease.
The teams utilized data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) containing information about demographics, blood pressure levels, hypertension status, antihypertensive medication usage, and co-morbidities for a sample of 59,799 noninstitutionalized US adults collected between 1999 and 2020.
As a prelude to the event, the department hosted a professional development session where the successful student groups below presented their accepted projects:
- Machine Learning-driven Risk Factor Identification on Post-2013 Blood Pressure Control Decline in Hypertensive Populations
Ruby (Yuyu) Chen, Taehyo Kim and Cindy Patippe - Characterizing Extremely High Blood Pressure: An Analysis of Changes in Prevalence and Correlates Associated with Extreme Values of Blood Pressure from 1999-2020
Xiaoting Chen, Zoé Haskell-Craig, Jianan Zhu and Iris Zhang - Association Between Hypertension Awareness and Control of Blood Pressure in the NHANES Dataset
Weng In Leong, Kaylen Wei and Phuc Vu
