ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1557721
This article is part of the Research TopicMetabolic Pathways to Multiple Long-term Conditions (Multimorbidity): Focusing on Cardio-metabolic Multimorbidity (CMM)View all 8 articles
An Unsupervised Cluster Analysis of Multimorbidity Patterns in Older Adults in Shenzhen, China
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen University Medical School, Shenzhen University, 518060, Shenzhen, China
- 2Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Modern Toxicology, Shenzhen Medical Key Discipline of Health Toxicology, Shenzhen Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 518055, Shenzhen, China
- 3Shenzhen University General Hospital, 518060, Shenzhen, China
- 4Health Management Center, Shenzhen University General Hospital, Shenzhen University, 518055, Shenzhen, China
- 5Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
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Background: Population ageing challenges health care systems due to the high prevalence and impact of multimorbidity in older adults. Studies on multimorbidity in Shenzhen have primarily focused on the quantity of multimorbidity, lacking in-depth exploration of multimorbidity patterns.Methods: Based on baseline data from the Shenzhen aging-related disease cohort, this study analyzed information from 8,911 people aged 60 and above after excluding missing and abnormal values from interview results. Using self-organizing map combined with weighted k-means, the distribution of diseases in the population was visualized, dividing the overall population into four clusters. The study also analyzed comorbidity and association rules for each cluster.Result: This study found a high prevalence of cardiometabolic comorbidities among the elderly in Shenzhen, reaching 15.83%, and detailed the distribution of specific comorbidity combinations. Hypertension had a high prevalence and was the most common factor in comorbidities among Shenzhen's elderly. Additionally, hyperuricemia was included as a disease to explore its multimorbidity patterns with other chronic conditions.The study found that multimorbidity is prevalent among the elderly in Shenzhen and explored their patterns, suggesting that Shenzhen should enhance screening and integrated management of high-risk groups and implement public health interventions to alleviate the multimorbidity burden.
Keywords: Multimorbidity1, Multimorbidity pattern2, Unsupervised learning3, Older Adults4, Shenzhen city5
Received: 09 Jan 2025; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guo, Liu, Guo, Zhang, Huang, Liu, Tan and Dan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Zhen Tan, Health Management Center, Shenzhen University General Hospital, Shenzhen University, 518055, Shenzhen, China
Guo Dan, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
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