Findings & Insights

Living with many health problems

Imagine you have a lot of different health problems all at once. This can be really hard and takes a lot of work to manage. The MELD-B researchers wanted to understand how much work it is for people who have many long-term health conditions. They looked at information from doctors' records to see how well these records show the different kinds of work people do to manage their health.

What they did

The MELD-B researchers used special tools to look at health records from millions of people across the UK. They wanted to see if the records showed things like how people learn about their health problems, how they keep track of their symptoms, and how they manage their medicines. They also looked at how people deal with the emotional and financial challenges of having many health problems.

What they found

The MELD-B researchers found that some types of work, like keeping track of symptoms and taking medicines, were recorded a lot in the health records. But other types of work, like dealing with emotions and financial problems, were not recorded as much. They also found that people with mental health problems had more records about their health work than people without mental health problems.

Why it matters

This study is important because it shows that doctors' records don't always capture all the hard work people do to manage their health. Understanding this can help doctors and scientists find better ways to support people with many health problems. They can work on making sure all the important parts of managing health are recorded and considered in treatment plans.

What’s next

The MELD-B researchers think more research is needed to understand why some types of health work are not recorded as much. They also want to find new ways to include all the important information in health records. This will help make sure that people with many health problems get the best care possible.

Read the full journal article here: Capturing the human impact of living with multiple long-term conditions in routine electronic health records – lost in translation?

This research paper talks about how things that happen to babies when they are born can affect their health when they grow up. The MELD-B researchers wanted to find out if babies who had problems at birth were more likely to have multiple health issues when they became adults.

They looked at a group of people who were born in one week of April 1970 in Britain. They collected information about these people when they were born and then again when they were 34, 38, 42, and 46 years old. The MELD-B researchers checked if these people had two or more long-term health problems, like asthma, diabetes, or high blood pressure. The MELD-B researchers found that 13.7% of the babies had one or more problems at birth, like being born too early, having trouble breathing, or needing special care.

The MELD-B researchers discovered that people who had two or more problems at birth were more likely to have multiple health issues when they were 38 years old. This was the only age where the results were significant. This means that at age 38, there was a clear link between having problems at birth and having multiple health issues. The MELD-B researchers think this might be because 38 is a time when people start to see the development of their early health problems, but they are not yet old enough for other age-related health issues to become more common.

The conclusion of the research is that problems at birth can be linked to having multiple health issues later in life. The MELD-B researchers suggest that to help people stay healthy, it might be important to focus on preventing problems at birth.

Read the full journal article here: Clusters and associations of adverse neonatal events with adult risk of multimorbidity: A secondary analysis of birth cohort data | PLOS One

Living with many health problems

This study is about people who live with more than one long-term health problem, like asthma, diabetes, or heart disease. When someone has two or more of these problems, it's called multiple long-term conditions or ‘multimorbidity’. The MELD-B researchers wanted to understand what it's like to live with so many health issues every day and the impact it has on people.

What did the researchers do?

The MELD-B researchers looked at over forty different studies that had talked to people with multiple health problems. They wanted to know about people’s experience and what they had to do to take care of themselves. The MELD-B researchers also involved people with experience of living with multiple health problems in the research. They found eight main things that people living with multiple health problems have to deal with. All of them create work for people:

1. Learning and Adapting: People have to learn a lot about their health problems and change their lives to manage them.

2. Accumulation and Complexity: Having many health problems makes life more complicated and it changes over time.

3. Symptom work: People have to deal with different symptoms from each health problem.

4. Emotional work: It can be very stressful and cause some emotional turmoil to live with multiple health problems.

5. Investigation and Monitoring: People need to go to the doctor and to hospitals a lot and have many tests.

6. Health Service and Administration: People have to manage appointments and paperwork for their healthcare.

7. Medication work: People need to get prescriptions, organise and take many different medicines, and remember when to take them.

8. Financial work: It can be expensive to pay things like travel and medicines that people living with multiple conditions need, as well as affecting ability to work.

Why is this important?

This study is important because it helps health care professionals and people planning health services to understand how hard it is for people with multiple health problems. By knowing this, they can find better ways to help people in this situation and work with them to make their lives easier.

Read the full journal article here: The impact of living with multiple long-term conditions (multimorbidity) on everyday life – a qualitative evidence synthesis | BMC Public Health | Full Text

This paper is about how things that happen to us when we're young can affect our health when we grow up. The MELD-B researchers wanted to understand how many different factors from our early life can combine to influence our health later on. They looked at three big studies from the UK that followed people from when they were kids all the way into adulthood.

The MELD-B researchers wanted to see how different factors from early life, like family income, parental health, and childhood experiences, could be grouped together to understand their combined effect on health. They used a method called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to group these factors into different categories or domains that had already been mapped in the researcher’s previous work.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a method used to simplify large sets of data by reducing the number of variables while still retaining most of the original information. Imagine you have a big puzzle with many pieces, and PCA helps you find the most important pieces that give you a good idea of what the whole picture looks like.

The MELD-B researchers discovered that certain factors, like maternal fertility histories, long-term illnesses, educational ability, ethnicity, parental health behaviours, housing, and parental-child interactions, were very important in understanding how early life affects health later on.

They also found that using multiple large-scale studies can provide enough data for researchers to consider how different early life risk factors combine to affect health. This approach can help challenge the existing understanding of disease and develop new ideas for preventing health problems.

The paper concludes that understanding and acting on these combined risk factors from early life can improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities in childhood. This research supports the idea that focusing on prevention and the building blocks of health is important for improving public health.

Read the full journal article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-72275-5

Understanding Health Risks and How We Can Change Them

Have you ever thought about things that make it more likely that we get sick? These are called "risk factors." Some of these risk factors can be changed to help us stay healthy. This document talks about what it means for a risk factor to be "modifiable," which means it can be changed.

Methodological Approach: How Do We Study Health Risks?

Scientists and doctors use different methods to study health risks. They ask important questions to understand if a risk factor can be changed. Here are some of the questions they ask:

1. Is it measurable? This means they need to know if they can measure the risk factor. For example, they can measure if someone smokes by asking if they smoke or not.

2. Is it potentially changeable? They check if the risk factor can be changed. For example, smoking can be changed by quitting smoking.

3. Are its causes modifiable in themselves? They look at what causes the risk factor and see if those causes can be changed too. For example, living in a poor area can cause health problems, and they check if they can change things like jobs or income to help.

4. Is it plausible as a cause? They see if it makes sense that the risk factor causes health problems. For example, certain jobs can expose people to more germs, which can make them sick.

5. Is there empirical evidence for its effect? They look for proof that changing the risk factor will improve health. For example, research studies show that quitting smoking can reduce the risk of heart disease.

What Are Modifiable Risk Factors?

Modifiable risk factors are things we can change to improve our health. For example, if someone smokes cigarettes, they can stop smoking to become healthier. Other examples include eating healthy foods, being physically active, and not drinking too much alcohol. These are all things people can change to help prevent getting sick.

Why Is It Important to Know About Modifiable Risk Factors?

Knowing about modifiable risk factors is important because it helps us understand what we can do to stay healthy. If we know what we can change, we can take action to make those changes. This can help us live longer and healthier lives.

Different Types of Risk Factors

There are different types of risk factors. Some are things we can't change, like our age or our genes. These are called "non-modifiable" risk factors. But there are many things we can change, like our habits and the environment we live in. These are the modifiable risk factors.

Conclusion

Understanding modifiable risk factors is important for everyone. It helps us know what we can do to improve our health and prevent diseases. By making small changes in our daily lives, we can make a big difference in our overall health and well-being.

Read the full journal article here: Risk factors for ill health: How do we specify what is ‘modifiable’? | PLOS Global Public Health

This research paper talks about how many different things in our lives can affect our health, especially when we are young. The MELD-B researchers used a special method to find out what these things are and consider how they might affect people throughout their lives. They looked at lots of studies and talked to experts. They also asked people not involved with the research to help them understand what is important. This way, they could find out what things in early life can make us healthy or not so healthy when we grow up.

Here are the twelve areas that can affect our health:

1. Before and right after birth: This includes everything from before a baby is born until the first month of life, like the mother's health during pregnancy and the baby's condition at birth.

2. Bad experiences in childhood: These are negative events like abuse, neglect, or losing a parent.

3. Child health: This covers the health of a child from birth to age 18, including illnesses and regular check-ups.

4. Developmental and behaviour: This includes how children grow and change as they get older, how they act, and any health issues they might have.

5. Education: This is about how well children do in school and the knowledge they gain.

6. Demographics: This includes details such as how big different groups of people are, where they live, and their ethnic backgrounds.

7. Parents health and behaviour: This looks at how parents' health and behaviours can affect their children.

8. Socioeconomic factors: These are social and economic issues like family income and housing.

9. Family environment This includes how parents talk to and spend time with their children, as well as the general atmosphere at home.

10. Neighbourhood and environment: This covers the external factors like the neighbourhood and access to healthcare.

11. Health behaviours and diet: This includes things like the food children eat and the amount of physical activity they get.

12. Religion, spirituality and wider culture: This looks at how religion, spirituality, and culture affect health.

These areas are important because they help us understand what makes us healthy or not so healthy as we grow up. The MELD-B researchers want to use this information to help plan further research and to support people who plan or deliver public services to make better decisions for our health in the future.

Read the full journal article here: A conceptual framework for characterising lifecourse determinants of multiple long-term condition multimorbidity

This research paper is about how the research team plan to do the research in the MELD-B project. The project is exploring why some people get many long-term health problems, like diabetes or asthma, at a relatively young age. The MELD-B research team wanted to find out what causes these health problems and how to prevent them.

The project is called MELD-B. The researchers are looking at different things that might affect health, like age, ethnicity, infections, accidents, smoking, diet, and the environment people grew up in. They are using computers and artificial intelligence (AI) to study a lot of data and find patterns.

One important part of the research is finding out which health problem comes first, called a "sentinel condition." This first condition can affect the chances of getting other health problems later. The researchers are studying data from people’s lives, starting from when they were born, to see how these conditions develop over time.

The goal is to find ways to prevent these health problems and help people live healthier lives. The researchers are also working with people with lived experience to understand what it’s like to live with these conditions and how to make things better for them.

By studying all this information, the MELD-B researchers hope to find the best opportunities to help people in their lifetime and stop these health problems from happening in the first place. They want to share their findings with doctors and policymakers to improve public health and make sure everyone has a chance to live a healthy life.

Read the full journal article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26335565231204544