The Diseases Database is a free

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

that provides information about the relationships between medical conditions,

symptoms Signs and symptoms are diagnostic indications of an illness, injury, or condition. Signs are objective and externally observable; symptoms are a person's reported subjective experiences. A sign for example may be a higher or lower temperature ...

, and

medications Medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal product, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to medical diagnosis, diagnose, cure, treat, or preventive medicine, prevent disease. Drug therapy (pharmaco ...

. 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 Type 2 diabetes (T2D), formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, is a form of diabetes mellitus that is characterized by high blood sugar, insulin resistance, and relative lack of insulin. Common symptoms include increased thirst, frequent ...

is labelled "a risk factor for" ischaemic heart disease. 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 engineers Joanne Berezin and Jeffrey Berezin. The eMedicine website consists of approximately 6,800 medical topic revi ...

and Wikipedia. # Most items are mapped to concepts within the Unified Medical Language System (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 medical classification that is used in epidemiology, health management and clinical diagnosis. The ICD is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the direc ...

and SNOMED.

References

External links

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