Roles of Anxiety and Depression in Predicting Cardiovascular Disease Among Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major complication of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). In addition to traditional risk factors, psychological determinants play an important role in CVD risk. This study applied Deep Neural Network (DNN) to develop a CVD risk prediction model and explored the bio-psycho-social contributors to the CVD risk among patients with T2DM. From 2017 to 2020, 834 patients with T2DM were recruited from the Department of Endocrinology, Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, China. In this cross-sectional study, the patients' bio-psycho-social information was collected through clinical examinations and questionnaires. The dataset was randomly split into a 75% train set and a 25% test set. DNN was implemented at the best performance on the train set and applied on the test set. The receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis was used to evaluate the model performance. Of participants, 272 (32.6%) were diagnosed with CVD. The developed ensemble model for CVD risk achieved an area under curve score of 0.91, accuracy of 87.50%, sensitivity of 88.06%, and specificity of 87.23%. Among patients with T2DM, the top five predictors in the CVD risk model were body mass index, anxiety, depression, total cholesterol, and systolic blood pressure. In summary, machine learning models can provide an automated identification mechanism for patients at CVD risk. Integrated treatment measures should be taken in health management, including clinical care, mental health improvement, and health behavior promotion.