Investigating the Categories for Cholesterol and Blood Pressure for Risk Assessment of Death Due to Coronary Heart Disease

Many characteristics for predicting death due to coronary heart disease are measured on a continuous scale. These characteristics, however, are often categorized for clinical use and to aid in treatment decisions. We would like to derive a systematic approach to determine the best categorizations of systolic blood pressure and cholesterol level for use in identifying individuals who are at high risk for death due to coronary heart disease and to compare these data derived categories to those in common usage. Whatever categories are chosen, they should allow physicians to accurately estimate the probability of survival from coronary heart disease until some time t. The best categories will be those that provide the most accurate prediction for an individual's risk of dying by t. The approach that will be used to determine these categories will be a version of Classification And Regression Trees that can be applied to censored survival data. The major goals of this dissertation are to obtain data-derived categories for risk assessment, compare these categories to the ones already recommended in the medical community, and to assess the performance of these categories in predicting survival probabilities.