COSMO-t1d: A new tool for communicating the benefits of improving risk factors in people with type 1 diabetes


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Dr An Duy Tran and his colleagues at the Universities of Melbourne, Oxford, Michigan and Gothenburg and other research institutes in Australia have recently published a study in Diabetes Care, which involved the development of a simulation model for type 1 diabetes based on a nationwide population of nearly 28,000 people with type 1 diabetes in Sweden. This model underwent a rigorous face and internal validation and can be used to estimate life expectancy for a person with type 1 diabetes and predict the occurrence of diabetes-related complications such as cardiovascular disease, severe hyperglycaemia and end-stage kidney disease. It is envisaged that the simulation model will provide an important tool for economic evaluation of emerging interventions for type 1 diabetes.

Given the high complexity of the model, Dr An Duy Tran has developed an interactive web application to facilitate communication between researchers, healthcare professionals and people with type 1 diabetes on the benefits of improving risk factors. This application provides graphical visualisations of how the occurrence of one complication influences the subsequent occurrence of other complications, and how different combinations of risk factors affect the risk of complications, life expectancy and complication-free survival time in people with type 1 diabetes. The web application also provides educational materials about the development of the simulation model to increase the transparency of the model as a health economic and clinical decision support tool.