While exploring data on cardiovascular disease (CVD) from the website “Our World in Data”, I wanted to create a data story that explored the risks for CVD. I was interested in seeing if certain risk factors were variable between countries.
The data included in this story came from 11 different age-standardized data sets linked by country and year (1990-2019). CVD risk factors included hypertension, diabetes, high BMI and smoking plus certain dietary risk factors. Countries were ranked by death rate (deaths per 100,000).
I used Tableau to create a story, starting with two dashboards as an introduction: CVD as the leading cause of death and CVD deaths rates by country over time, with the ability to isolate by country. The 3rd dashboard introduces the idea of risk factors, and shows the estimated death rate from CVD attributed to each risk factor in a simple bar graph. The 4th and 5th dashboards then present the differences in risk factor death rates by country and global rank using a dot plot and radial graph. To show the inter-relationship of all the risk factors on CVD, I used an interactive network graph made in Flourish as the final visual to present the idea that CVD health is dependent on human behavior and the choices people make with their health.