A new tool enables researchers to explore disease patterns from 7.2 million patients spanning 25 years. The tool is freely available for the scientific community and requires no prerequisite bioinformatics or medical informatics skills.

«A lot of research focus is on investigating one disease at a time. We try to add a time perspective and look at multiple diseases following each other to discover where are the most common trajectories — what are the disease highways that we as people encounter,» says professor Soren Brunak from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at University of Copenhagen.

To illustrate the use of the tool the research group looked at data for Down Syndrome patients and showed, as expected, that these patients in general are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease at an earlier age that others. Other frequent diseases are displayed as well.

The Danish Disease Trajectory Browser is published in Nature Communications.

Making health data accessible for research

In general, there is a barrier for working with health data in research. Both in terms of getting approval from authorities to handle patient data and the fact that researchers need specific technical skills to extract meaningful information from the data.

Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Copenhagen The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.