From Hypertension to Cardiovascular Risk: Rod Jackson’s Big-Data Impact in New Zealand

Adrian, a Butler University Medical Science Bridge Program faculty member, interviews Dr. Rod Jackson, an epidemiologist at the University of Auckland, on the Building Bridges podcast. Jackson describes growing up in rural New Zealand, choosing medicine, and shifting from clinical practice to public health after working with cardiovascular epidemiologist Robert Beaglehole, focusing on prevention such as smoking reduction. He explains how conflicting hypertension definitions led him in the late 1980s to advocate replacing single risk-factor thresholds with multivariable cardiovascular risk assessment, influencing New Zealand guidelines in the 1990s and later integrated cardiovascular risk guidelines. To replace Framingham-based estimates, he helped build a primary-care clinical decision support system that created a linked national cohort exceeding 500,000 people, producing New Zealand “PREDICT” risk equations published in The Lancet (2018) and diabetes-specific equations (2021), incorporating ethnicity and social deprivation to address inequities.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:51 Oxford Mentorship Story

02:06 Rod Jackson Bio Highlights

04:25 Early Life and Schooling

06:03 Choosing Medicine and Prevention

08:12 Switch to Epidemiology

10:11 Hypertension Definition Mess

13:41 Risk Based Guidelines Breakthrough

17:12 Building NZ Predict Cohort

21:50 Equity and Social Determinants

23:46 Part One Wrap Up

Cardiovascular disease risk prediction equations published in The Lancet – University of Auckland