You can plot customized networks, obtain network parameters and descriptive statistics of data.

PLOT NETWORKS

The basic elements of the networks are nodes (chronic health conditions) and edges (coexistence of disease) that connect nodes within the network. Connections are defined according to coexistence to a greater degree than expected by the prevalence of diseases.

Select options.

  1. Select network resolution. Choose the disease classification system:

There is a list of the abbreviations used in all these classification systems in the help part.

Diseases included are an adapted version of the list of chronic conditions based on ICPC-2 codes described by O’Halloran. Conditions with less than 1000 patients were not included.

  1. Select network stratification.

Patient’s age was defined as the mean value between the age when the first and last diagnoses were made within the study period or the age in the middle of the period for the cases without new diagnoses made in the period.

  1. Select Disease subnet. You can visualize global networks or subnets focused on a chronic condition. It is possible to extract subnets for

  1. Risk and/or Protective interactions

  1. Odds Ratio Filter

You can select the minimum odds ratio considered to filter a risk association ranging from 1.2 to 2, and the maximum OR to represent protective interactions from 0.8 to 0.5.

  1. p-value

By default p- value threshold used in the association measures is <1e-5 (Bonferroni correction to account for multiple tests), but it is possible to use other p-value (ranging from <1e-2 to <1e-10).

  1. Directed Networks

With this option temporal associations are considered to construct directed networks. Only temporal association for probabilities below 40% or above 60% that a disease was diagnosed previously or afterward another one are considered. Conditions diagnosed between 41 and 59% of the times before or after another one are considered to have no temporal association and represented with a bidirectional arrow.

  1. Color nodes

Edge thickness in the network plots are proportional to OR values and are green for protective interactions and red for risk interactions. The node size shown in plots depends on the degree of the condition in the network. The node colour can be selected according to different criteria: clustering coefficient, pageRank value, system location (digestive, respiratory…).

For a chronic condition subnet, the colour and the size of the nodes can be selected according to the chosen attribute value in the general network (Global network params) or within the subnet.

Press submit

When you press submit, in a few seconds the networks will be displayed.

There is the option to download the network.

NETWORK PARAMETERS

For the plotted network or subnet the network descriptive parameters are displayed: number of nodes and eedges, diameter, shortest_Pathway, density, average neighbors, clustering_coefficient and centralization.

For all nodes the degree is displayed and can be downloaded. For each pair of connected nodes the Odds Ratio (OR), frequency of each condition and of the comorbidity is displayed and can be downloaded.

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS OF DATA

In this tab descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage of the conditions) of the study population can be visualized and downloaded with some filtering options: gender, age group, diagnose period, tobacco use, region, rurality, and socioeconomic group (medea index).