Electronic Patient Records used to help Identify Biological Causality

Research demonstrating the use of data mining of electronic patient records to study co-morbidity, family predisposition, and finding biological causes for medical conditions otherwise hidden to the eye will be presented at the APA Annual Meeting in Honolulu.

The APA’s 164th Annual Meeting, the world’s largest psychiatric meeting, will run Saturday, May 14 to Wednesday, May 18, 2010 at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.

The study looked at 10 years of records from Mental Health Centre Sct. Hans, a regional psychiatric hospital in Denmark, on 3,290 patients’ records involving 674 different diagnoses. Of the assigned diagnoses 24% were mental and behavioral disorders. Researchers identified about 270 co-morbidities as unexpected with no know relation. These unexpected co-morbidities were further analyzed to examine whether the co-morbidity could be explained by shared genes, gene-complex, or biological pathways.

For one of these, researchers discovered a previously unrecognized shared biology underlying the two clinical conditions which can be interpreted as a shared genetic predisposition to side effects or to an autoimmune condition.
The new research posters (#NR02-60) were scheduled for presentation Saturday, May 14, at the Hawaii Convention Center.