Abstract Introduction/Objective It is estimated that at least 20% of the 5 billion lab orders submitted annually are inappropriate. Use an appropriate laboratory test utilization management system (TUMS) can significantly overcome this. Laboratory Decision System (LDS) only automated TUMS to assist providers understand, select, order, and optimally utilize tests for disease diagnosis management...

INTRODUCTION Schizophrenia is a severe, debilitating mental disorder that affects both the physical health and the functional capacity of patients, causing great impairment throughout the life course. Although physical and cognitive impairments may represent different expressions of a single systemic inflammatory process, little is known about the relationship between motor function and schizop...

In order to compare survival rates in Japan with those in the USA and European countries, we abstracted the 5-year relative survival rate from several data sources. Survival rates of cancer diagnosed in 1995–99 in the USA were abstracted from 18 cancer registries in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) data (1). Survival rates of cancer diagnosed in 1995–99 in the UK and Norway...

BACKGROUND Increasing severe vegetation fires worldwide has been attributed to both global environmental change and land management practices. However there is little evidence concerning the population health effects of outdoor air pollution derived from biomass fires. Frequent seasonal bushfires near Darwin, Australia provide an opportunity to examine this issue. We examined the relationship b...

BACKGROUND Some studies suggest smoking may result in poorer clinical outcomes in head and neck cancer, but the evidence is heterogeneous and some of it is poor quality. In a large, population-based, study we investigated: (i) whether smoking at diagnosis is an independent prognostic factor for cancer-specific survival in head and neck cancer; and (ii) whether the association varies by site and...

Alcohol dementia (ALD) usually follows long-term alcohol dependence. The major psychiatric features of ALD are general loss of short-and long-term memory combined with disturbances in concentration and a decrease in intellectual capacity, all of which persist during abstinence. Despite its clinical importance, few studies have been published up to now on medical treatment of ALD and other alcoh...

We read with interest the article by McCormack et al. about frequency and costs of hospitalisations of mitochondrial disorder (MID) patients in California [1]. There are several reasons why the figures provided are underestimations. First, quite a number of MIDs go undetected or are misinterpreted as another disease. Particularly, patients with multiorgan disease are frequently in fact mitochon...

In health, there exist practically as many different terminologies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems as there are fields of application. In fact, terminologies play important roles in clinical data capture, annotation, reporting, information integration, indexing and retrieval. These knowledge sources havemostly different formats and purposes. For example, among many...