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Data mining finds new disease links
By Rachel Ehrenberg
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.
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.
Using the World Health Organiza-
tion’s codes for classifying diseases,
researchers generated a map that linked
more than 4,700 patients at Denmark’s
largest psychiatric hospital by their diag-
noses. The team integrated these data
with information gleaned from a text-
mining algorithm that combed through
10 years’ worth of clinicians’ notes.
A network depicting patient diagnoses
reveals connections between, for exam-
ple, diabetes (light orange, top) and
hypertension (dark green, top right).
migraines — and also has been linked to
schizophrenia.
Clinical notes are a huge source of
information, says Stéphane Meystre, a
specialist in biomedical informatics at
the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
“This approach clusters information in
a much more detailed way.”
El Niños may fuel
civil uprisings
Food prices, unemployment
may link climate to unrest
organized parties that claim more than
25 lives. But, the group reports in the
Aug. 25 Nature, droughts, torrential
rains and other extreme weather that
tend to develop during El Niño years
can devastate crop yields, leading to
higher food prices and unemployment
in affected nations — home to half of the
world’s population.
“I’m one of those people who would
be generally skeptical about correlat-
ing things to climate,” says statistician
Andre w Solow of the Woods Hole Ocean-
ographic Institution in Massachusetts.
But the new finding makes sense, he
says: In poor countries where the econ-
omy is closely linked to agriculture —
and therefore the weather—failed
harvests and diminishing food supplies
can leave large numbers of people avail-
able to engage in civil uprisings.
Hsiang and his colleagues analyzed
By Janet Raloff
One in five major civil conflicts since
1950 may be linked to climate extremes
associated with El Niños — periods of
warming lasting a year or longer in surface waters of the central equatorial
Pacific, a new study finds.
Solomon Hsiang of Princeton University and his coauthors at Columbia
University emphasize that they don’t
know what mechanism might link
El Niños to eruptions of major civil unrest,
which the team defines as political disputes between governments and other
234 civil conflicts that broke out within
175 nations between 1950 and 2004.
In any given year, the probability that
a new conflict would erupt among
the 90 or so nations whose climates
are vulnerable to El Niño events was
4. 1 percent. That’s twice the conflict
rate in countries largely immune to
El Niño effects.
Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England
Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., argues that the new study
is a good example “of the progress that
has been made in understanding how we
can predict social behavior writ large.”
The correlation doesn’t prove that
El Niño weather disruptions cause civil
unrest, he acknowledges. “But a properly
used and understood correlation is an
important tool for understanding inter-dependencies in complex systems — and
the world around us.”
