The Heart Project
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States and in New York State. More than 800,000 people in the United States die from cardiovascular disease each year—that’s 1 in every 3 deaths, and about 160,000 of them occur in people under age 65. As young residents of New York City, we were collectively interested in investigating prevalence of heart disease and stroke and their risk factors in our city to help us identify targets for cardiovascular prevention policy implementation.
Dataset
We utilized the 500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health dataset. The 500 Cities project is a collaboration between CDC, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the CDC Foundation. The purpose of the 500 Cities Project is to provide city- and census tract-level small area estimates for chronic disease risk factors, health outcomes, and clinical preventive service use for the largest 500 cities in the United States. Since we were interested in visualizing these data only for New York city, we filtered the dataset to include data only from New York city. The current dataset includes prevalence estimates across 2015 and 2016.
Findings
All of the risk factors (with the exception of binge drinking and cholesterol screening) have a positive association with both coronary heart disease and stroke. The top risk factors for both outcomes are high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and poor physical Health. In addition, many of the risk factors are associated with each other; namely, physical inactivity is heavily correlated with many of the other variables. The risk factors tend to be similarly associated with both coronary heart disease and stroke, with stronger associations with stroke.
The map of NYC allows you to explore the prevlances of risk factors across the city. We observed that most of the risk factors were observed with higher frequency in the Harlem and Bronx area. Unhealthy behaviors like binge alcohol drinking, however, were more prevalent in downtown Manhattan.
For a detailed explanation of our findings and conclusions, read our Project Report here
Website Overview
Analysis: Correlation of Risk Factors with Coronary Disease and Stroke at Census-tract level in New York City (2015-2016)
NYC Map: Prevalence of Health Indicators throughout New York City
Find Your Risk!: App that allows for input of risk factor variables of an indivdual and predicts the 10-year cardiovascular risk using the Framingham risk score algorithm
For a brief overview of our website, view our screencast here