Our Impact

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common lung condition, often caused by smoking. Patients living with COPD may suffer from shortness of breath and this can worsen unpredictably in flare-ups known as exacerbations. These often require hospital care. COPD is the commonest cause of emergency attendance to the hospital with breathlessness, and the third commonest cause of death worldwide. We plan to use health data from deidentified people with COPD to find risk factors for these exacerbations and other harmful outcomes including death. This will include using machine learning techniques, where advanced computers look for patterns in records that might otherwise be missed. Our aim is to create a new prediction tool that could be used to target care to patients identified at risk of deterioration. 

This project is a continuation of DL_2022_024 and involves new project partners in NHS Lothian to quickly move developments from this project into patient care. 

About one in two hundred people have myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), sometimes referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). ME is an understudied illness. How symptoms and treatments vary across the lifespan of people with ME is unknown. This disease is associated with very poor health-related quality of life. There is no cure or effective treatment of symptoms and no biomedical understanding of what causes ME. Our project is intended to shine a light on the lifelong experiences of thousands of people with ME in Scotland. We will use electronic health record data within DataLoch to understand factors that pre-dispose them to the illness and the impact the disease has on their life and long-term health. We hope to find different illness patterns to better understand how subgroups of ME patients experience the disease over their lifetime, and to look for markers from clinical tests that could identify people with ME.