Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wired together and left running in a corner. But stored on disks in these machines is an extraordinary medical cornucopia: the details of thousands of heart attacks painstakingly etched into silicon over nearly 30 years. Each spasm, each chemical released into the bloodstream by a dying heart muscle, each patient's treatment, is registered in this giant multivariate database by doctors, nurses and researchers at Duke University. The heart of the Medical Center's Databank for Cardiovascular Disease, these computers tell doctors, with greater certainty and accuracy every day, the best ways to treat not just heart attacks...
...analyzing inflation, interest and unemployment rates and coming up with a forecast of which way the economy will go, the Duke databank, now a part of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, correlates important information about the body--enzyme levels, age, family history--into a prediction of how a given patient will respond to a certain type of treatment. Doctors on five continents dial into the system, type in the critical components of their patient's problem and get a recommendation for treatment based on the thousands of patients who have passed that way before. And of course doctors at Duke...
...DeSilva, are viruses, which by their nature invade cells and deposit their genetic material into the cell nucleus. Researchers have learned how to strip the viruses of their reproductive genes, insert into the viral DNA the beneficial gene they want to deliver, and then let the virus infect a patient's cells. The virus inserts its own now harmless genes, as well as the beneficial one, into the cellular DNA. If all goes well and the gene "expresses" itself, the cell begins producing the needed protein...
Though that may seem extraordinary, such major advances in the collection and analysis of patient information are becoming commonplace in modern medicine; technology has made the impossible probable and the unlikely a certainty. Twenty years ago cardiologists mostly guessed at what caused heart attacks. Now young heart doctors, using chemicals, nuclear imaging devices and databases like the one at Duke, can diagnose and treat heart attacks with astonishing efficiency...
...doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center performed the first gene therapy on a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease caused by the immune system's running amuck and attacking the body's connective tissue. Their strategy was to expose cells in the swollen tissue lining their patient's finger joints to genetically engineered viruses. These viruses carried a gene responsible for a protein that blocks the action of interleukin-1, a substance that stimulates immune-system activity. Without that stimulation, the doctors hope, the immune system will halt its assault on the joint linings...