Solveig Argeseanu Cunningham
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
About one in four US adults lives with multimorbidity, meaning two or more chronic diseases at once. People with multimorbidity face more disability, higher risk of death and higher medical costs than people with a single condition.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
multimorbidity
multiple chronic conditions
chronic disease
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Harmonize and bridge seven national cohort datasets, including Add Health, PSID, REGARDS and HRS, into a synthetic, nationally representative cohort that tracks chronic disease from age 30.
- Estimate age-specific rates of progression to multimorbidity and identify sentinel conditions that predict added diseases, modeling the chance of each next condition given prior ones.
- Calculate lifetime risk of multimorbidity and years lived with it for US adults, using Kaplan-Meier survival probabilities and Poisson regression on the bridged cohort.
- Compare sentinel conditions, progression and lifetime risk across race-ethnic, sex, economic and geographic groups, adjusting for differential mortality, and model disease-free life expectancy gains from reducing disparities.
More about the research
Yet little is known about when multimorbidity begins, how one disease leads to the next, or how these patterns differ across racial, ethnic, sex, economic and geographic groups. Clinical guidelines and prevention efforts need that information.
Why it matters
The results could help clinicians and guideline writers learn which early chronic conditions most strongly predict further disease and at what ages to step in. Policymakers would gain estimates of how many disease-free years delaying these conditions could add. Groups facing unequal disease burdens could benefit from better-targeted prevention, and aging researchers would gain a shared national data resource.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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