Linking environmental and health care databases: Assessing the health effects of environmental pollutants

The assessment of pollutant effects on health status requires the mergence and analysis of two different databases: pollution measurements and health care information. This paper compares two subsets of these data: Ohio Environmental Protection Agency data on ambient air pollutants and Ohio Medicare data on respiratory diseases. Small area analysis was performed to assess statewide variations in hospital admission rates for respiratory diseases. The ambient air pollutant levels for each small area were compared to the variations in respiratory disease rates. Five groups of diseases correlated with pollutant levels. In addition, pollutant levels were significantly associated with medical complications. This study demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of linking environmental and health care databases and suggests the need for a more comprehensive, automated analysis of more pollutants and diseases.     

Clinical guidelines contribute to the health inequities experienced by individuals with intellectual disabilities

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Clinical practice guidelines are developed to improve the quality of healthcare. However, clinical guidelines may contribute to health inequities experienced by disadvantaged groups. This study uses an equity lens developed by the International Clinical Epidemiology Network (INCLEN) to examine how well clinical guidelines address inequities experienced by individuals with intellectual disabilities. METHODS: Nine health problems relevant to the health inequities experienced by persons with intellectual disabilities were selected. Clinical guidelines on these disorders were identified from across the world. The INCLEN equity lens was used as the basis for a purposedesigned, semistructured data collection tool. Two raters independently examined each guideline and completed the data collection tool. The data extracted by each rater were discussed at a research group consensus conference and agreement was reached on a final equity lens rating for each guideline. RESULTS: Thirty-six guidelines were identified, one of which (2.8%) explicitly excluded persons with intellectual disabilities. Of the remaining 35, six (17.1%) met the first criterion of the equity lens, identifying persons with intellectual disabilities at high risk for the specific health problem. Eight guidelines (22.9%) contained any content on intellectual disabilities. Six guidelines addressed the fourth equity lens criterion, by giving specific consideration to the barriers to implementation of the guideline in disadvantaged populations. There were no guidelines that addressed the second, third, and fifth equity lens criteria. CONCLUSIONS: The equity lens is a useful tool to systematically examine whether clinical guidelines address the health needs and inequities experienced by disadvantaged groups. Clinical guidelines are likely to further widen the health inequities experienced by persons with intellectual disabilities, and other disadvantaged groups, by being preferentially advantageous to the general population. There is a need to systematically incorporate methods to consider disadvantaged population groups into the processes used to develop clinical guidelines.     

An overview of human protein databases and their application to functional proteomics in health and disease

Functional proteomics can be defined as a strategy to couple proteomic information with biochemical and physiological analyses with the aim of understanding better the functions of proteins in normal and diseased organs. In recent years, a variety of publicly available bioinformatics databases have been developed to support protein-related information management and biological knowledge discovery. In addition to being used to annotate the proteome, these resources also offer the opportunity to develop global approaches to the study of the functional role of proteins both in health and disease. Here, we present a comprehensive review of the major human protein bioinformatics databases. We conclude this review by discussing a few examples that illustrate the importance of these databases in functional proteomics research.     

Personal access to sequence databases on personal computers.

A comprehensive package of software has been developed to access nucleic acid and protein sequence databases on stand-alone IBM personal computers. The software combines keyword search on the annotation fields of the data with pattern matching algorithms on the biological sequences. Sequences containing complex sites like promoters or kink sites can be identified as well as sequences that are similar to a query sequence. Protein sequences with particular patterns of amino acids such as hydrophobic regions can be identified as well. Considering the relatively inexpensive hard disks now available, personal computers have become a cost-effective alternative to mainframe processing for sequence databases.     

Designing databases to store biological information

The increasing amount of data produced by large-scale biological experiments has highlighted the inadequacies of traditional scientific data management methods such as laboratory notebooks. Databases designed to store biological information are becoming increasingly common, but there is little guidance in the literature about the best practices of biological database design. This paper suggests best practices, and provides examples for the implementation of these practices.     

Engineering microbes to produce biofuels

The current biofuels landscape is chaotic. It is controlled by the rules imposed by economic forces and driven by the necessity of finding new sources of energy, particularly motor fuels. The need is bringing forth great creativity in uncovering new candidate fuel molecules that can be made via metabolic engineering. These next generation fuels include long-chain alcohols, terpenoid hydrocarbons, and diesel-length alkanes. Renewable fuels contain carbon derived from carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is derived directly by a photosynthetic fuel-producing organism(s) or via intermediary biomass polymers that were previously derived from carbon dioxide. To use the latter economically, biomass depolymerization processes must improve and this is a very active area of research. There are competitive approaches with some groups using enzyme based methods and others using chemical catalysts. With the former, feedstock and end-product toxicity loom as major problems. Advances chiefly rest on the ability to manipulate biological systems. Computational and modular construction approaches are key. For example, novel metabolic networks have been constructed to make long-chain alcohols and hydrocarbons that have superior fuel properties over ethanol. A particularly exciting approach is to implement a direct utilization of solar energy to make a usable fuel. A number of approaches use the components of current biological systems, but re-engineer them for more direct, efficient production of fuels.