title: Developing a synthetic national population to investigate the impact of different cardiovascular disease risk management strategies: A derivation and validation study.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Many national cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factor management guidelines now recommend that drug treatment decisions should be informed primarily by patients' multi-variable predicted risk of CVD, rather than on the basis of single risk factor thresholds. To investigate the potential impact of treatment guidelines based on CVD risk thresholds at a national level requires individual level data representing the multi-variable CVD risk factor profiles for a country's total adult population. As these data are seldom, if ever, available, we aimed to create a synthetic population, representing the joint CVD risk factor distributions of the adult New Zealand population.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A synthetic population of 2,451,278 individuals, representing the actual age, gender, ethnicity and social deprivation composition of people aged 30-84 years who completed the 2013 New Zealand census was generated using Monte Carlo sampling. Each 'synthetic' person was then probabilistically assigned values of the remaining cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors required for predicting their CVD risk, based on data from the national census national hospitalisation and drug dispensing databases and a large regional cohort study, using Monte Carlo sampling and multiple imputation. Where possible, the synthetic population CVD risk distributions for each non-demographic risk factor were validated against independent New Zealand data sources.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We were able to develop a synthetic national population with realistic multi-variable CVD risk characteristics. The construction of this population is the first step in the development of a micro-simulation model intended to investigate the likely impact of a range of national CVD risk management strategies that will inform CVD risk management guideline updates in New Zealand and elsewhere.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Health Policy, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.|School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Josh
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5268-8263
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Knight
authors.affiliation: School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wells
authors.affiliation: School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Marshall
authors.affiliation: School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Exeter
authors.affiliation: School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Rod
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jackson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001794:Blood Pressure; D002318:Cardiovascular Diseases / Q000628:therapy*; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012308:Risk Management; D012907:Smoking / Q000453:epidemiology