Danish scientists have devised a new way to connect the dots between diseases. Integrating data mining that extracts information from clinicians’ notes with protein and genetic information can reveal connections between health problems as seemingly unrelated as migraines and hair loss, or glaucoma and a hunching back, researchers report August 25 in PLoS Computational Biology.
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Besides generating new leads about the molecular workings of disease, the approach is also revealing a much richer portrait of each patient, says study coauthor Søren Brunak of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby and the University of Copenhagen.