Background: Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Cancer screenings can detect precancerous cells and allow for earlier diagnosis and treatment. Our purpose was to better understand risk factors for cancer screenings and assess the effect of cancer screenings on changes of Cardiovascular health (CVH) measures before and after cancer screenings among patients.
Methods: We used The Guideline Advantage (TGA)-American Heart Association ambulatory quality clinical data registry of electronic health record data (n = 362,533 patients) to investigate associations between time-series CVH measures and receipt of breast, cervical, and colon cancer screenings. Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks was employed to predict receipt of cancer screenings. We also compared the distributions of CVH factors between patients who received cancer screenings and those who did not. Finally, we examined and quantified changes in CVH measures among the screened and non-screened groups.
Results: Model performance was evaluated by the area under the receiver operator curve (AUROC): the average AUROC of 10 curves was 0.63 for breast, 0.70 for cervical, and 0.61 for colon cancer screening. Distribution comparison found that screened patients had a higher prevalence of poor CVH categories. CVH submetrics were improved for patients after cancer screenings.
Conclusion: Deep learning algorithm could be used to investigate the associations between time-series CVH measures and cancer screenings in an ambulatory population. Patients with more adverse CVH profiles tend to be screened for cancers, and cancer screening may also prompt favorable changes in CVH. Cancer screenings may increase patient CVH health, thus potentially decreasing burden of disease and costs for the health system (e.g., cardiovascular diseases and cancers).