UKB

UKB visualizes and quantifies disease prevalence disparities across demographic and socioeconomic groups in the UK Biobank to support analysis of health inequalities.

Key Features:

• Exploration of disparity landscapes: Enables identification and comparison of health disparity patterns across diseases and population groups.
• Participant group characterization: Defines groups by age, country of residence, ethnic group, sex, and socioeconomic deprivation.
• Disease cohort definition: Maps International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) diagnosis codes to phecodes to establish phecode case-control cohorts.
• Prevalence computation: Computes disease percent prevalence values from phecode case-control cohorts for each defined group.
• Disparity quantification: Quantifies disparity magnitude using both the difference and the ratio of the range of disease prevalence values among groups.
• Dataset coverage: Reports prevalence metrics for 1,513 diseases derived from a cohort exceeding 500,000 UK Biobank participants.

Scientific Applications:

• Health inequality research: Supports analysis of disease burden differences across demographic and socioeconomic strata.
• Social determinants of health: Enables investigation of associations between socioeconomic attributes and disease prevalence.
• Public health prioritization: Identifies diseases and population groups with large prevalence disparities for targeted intervention planning.
• Epidemiology and policy support: Provides prevalence and disparity metrics useful for epidemiologists, public health professionals, and policymakers.

Methodology:

ICD-10 diagnosis codes are mapped to phecodes to create phecode case-control cohorts; disease percent prevalence is computed per group defined by age, country of residence, ethnic group, sex, and socioeconomic deprivation; disparity magnitude is calculated as the difference and the ratio of the range of prevalence values among groups.