The Diseases Database is a free

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...

that provides information about the relationships between medical conditions, symptoms, and medications. The database is run by Medical Object Oriented Software Enterprises Ltd, a company based in London. The site's stated aim is "education, background reading and general interest" with an intended audience "physicians, other clinical healthcare workers and students of these professions". The editor of the site is stated as Malcolm H Duncan, a UK qualified medical doctor.

Organization

The Diseases Database is based on a collection of about 8,500 concepts, called "items", related to human medicine including diseases, drugs, symptoms, physical signs and abnormal laboratory results. In order to link items to both each other and external information resources three sets of metadata are modelled within the database. # Items are assigned various relationships e.g. diabetes mellitus type 2 is labelled "a risk factor for"

ischaemic heart disease Coronary artery disease (CAD), also called coronary heart disease (CHD), ischemic heart disease (IHD), myocardial ischemia, or simply heart disease, involves the reduction of blood flow to the heart muscle due to build-up of atherosclerotic pla ...

. More formally the database employs an entity-attribute-value model with items populating both entity and value slots. Relationships may be read in either direction e.g. the assertion "myocardial infarction chest pain" has the corollary "chest pain myocardial infarction". Such relationships aggregate within the database and allow lists to be retrieved - e.g. a list of items which may cause chest pain, and a list of items which may be caused by myocardial infarction. # Most items are assigned topic specific hyperlinks to Web resources which include

Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) is a continuously updated catalog of human genes and genetic disorders and traits, with a particular focus on the gene-phenotype relationship. , approximately 9,000 of the over 25,000 entries in OMIM ...

eMedicine eMedicine is an online clinical medical knowledge base founded in 1996 by doctors Scott Plantz and Jonathan Adler, and computer engineer Jeffrey Berezin. The eMedicine website consists of approximately 6,800 medical topic review articles, each of ...

and Wikipedia. # Most items are mapped to concepts within the

Unified Medical Language System The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences (created 1986). It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various termi ...

(UMLS). UMLS links enable the display of short text definitions or Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) scope notes for the majority of items on the database. The UMLS map also enables links to and from other medical classifications and terminologies e.g.

ICD-9 The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a globally used diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. The ICD is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the directing and coordinatin ...

and

SNOMED The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) is a systematic, computer-processable collection of medical terms, in human and veterinary medicine, to provide codes, terms, synonyms and definitions which cover anatomy, diseases, findings, pr ...

References

External links

* {{official website, www.diseasesdatabase.com Medical databases in the United Kingdom Medical literature