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The moon is about to become crowded.
In the next few years a slew of countries, including China, India, and Japan, are looking to put unmanned probes on the lunar surface. But more unprecedented are the 26 teams currently racing to win the Google Lunar X Prize a contest that will award $20 million to the first private company to land a robot on the lunar surface, travel a third of a mile, and send back a high-definition image before 2015.
With all this activity, NASA is somewhat nervous about its own lunar history. The agency recently released a set of guidelines that aim to preserve important heritage locations such as the Apollo landing and Ranger impact sites. The report, available since 2011 to members of the private spaceflight community, was publicly posted at NASAs website and officially accepted by the X Prize foundation on May 24.
NASA has recognized that these sites are important to mankind and have to be protected to make sure theres no undue damage done to them, said John Thornton, president of Astrobotic Technology Inc., a company competing for the prize.
Though NASA has no way of enforcing the requirements, they are designed to protect materials and scientific equipment at historical lunar sites as well as future landing sites. The guidelines have been made available internationally, and the agency welcomes other nations to participate in and improve upon them, said NASA spokesperson Joshua Buck in an e-mail.
NASA is asking anyone that makes it to the lunar surface to keep their landing at least 1.2 miles away from any Apollo site and about 1,600 feet from the five Ranger impact sites. The distance should keep the old equipment safe from a terrible accident or collision. It will also would put the new equipment over the lunar horizon relative to the relics, and prevent any moon dust known to be a highly abrasive material from sandblasting NASAs old machines.
The Apollo 11 and 17 sites the first and last places visited by man are singled out in particular for extra care and respect. Robots are prohibited from visiting both sites and are requested to remain outside a large radius (250 feet for Apollo 11 and 740 feet for Apollo 17) to prevent a stray rover from accidentally harming hardware or erasing any footprints.
Only one misstep could forever damage this priceless human treasure, reads the report.
Looking toward a possible high-traffic lunar future, the report also warns that frequent and repeated visits would have a cumulative and irreversible degrading effect on the historical sites. Other guidelines ask that rovers avoid kicking dust onto existing scientific experiments, like the laser-ranging lunar reflectors that are used to measure the distance between the Earth and moon.
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Keep Out: NASA Asks Future Moon Visitors to Respect Its Stuff
Five UC San Diego scientists have received almost $12 million combined from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to pay for stem cell-based research, the university announced today.
A team led by Lawrence Goldstein, of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program, was given $1.8 million to continue looking for new methods to find and test possible medications for Alzheimer's disease, according to UCSD. They use reprogrammed stem cells in their work.
Dr. Mark Tuszynski, professor of neurosciences and director of the Center for Neural Repair, received $4.6 million to develop more potent stem cell-based treatments for spinal cord injuries.
Gene Yeo, assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, was awarded $1.6 million to continue research into treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. His research hopes to take advantage of recent discoveries about ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, which center on mutations in RNA-binding proteins that cause dysfunction and death in neurons.
Dr. Eric David Adler, an associate clinical professor of medicine and cardiologist, was granted $1.7 million to screen potential drugs for Danon disease, a type of inherited heart failure that frequently kills patients by their 20s.
Yang Xu, a professor in the Division of Biological Sciences, was given $1.8 million to research the use of human embryonic stem cells to produce a renewable source of heart muscle cells that replace cells damaged or destroyed by disease, while overcoming biological resistance to new cells.
"With these new awards, the (institute) now has 52 projects in 33 diseases at varying stages of working toward clinical trials,'' said Jonathan Thomas, chairman of the CIRM governing board. "Californians should take pride in being at the center of this worldwide research leading toward new cures.''
CIRM was established in November 2004 with voter passage of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act. UC San Diego has received $112 million since CIRM began providing grants six years ago.
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UC San Diego Scientists Net $12 Million For Stem Cell Research
The American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine has now added an in-house herbal clinic to its 913-room facility in San Francisco. Patients can receive premium quality organic herbal remedies selected by trained professionals.San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 26, 2012 The American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine San Francisco (ACTCM) recently opened its herbal clinic in the Potrero Hill ...
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American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine San Francisco Opens Herbal Clinic
HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Among the graduation ceremonies this weekend was a special one. Two-hundred and sixteen students received their degrees in medicine from UT Health Medical School. And one famous Houstonian was there to see his grandson follow in his footsteps and become a doctor -- legendary heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley.
They are the grandsons of Dr. Cooley, one of the most famous heart surgeons in history, and Peter Kaldis and Charlie Fraser are medical students at UT Health Medical School.
"He's brilliant, he's very witty and he's very fun to be around," said Fraser.
Kaldis remembered how his grandfather's name would often come up in class.
"The surgeon would ask for the 'my scissors' and they'd go in and do a story about these scissors. These are called 'my scissors' because Dr. Cooley would ask for 'my scissors' and he designed these not knowing that I was his grandson," said Kaldis.
And when other med students would find out who they were.
"Most of them say it's pretty cool," said Fraser.
"I remember being little and looking in the Guinness Book of World Records and seeing there's my grandfather's name!" said granddaughter Laura Fraser.
Of the five Cooley children and 16 grandchildren, nine are in the medical field. His daughter, Dr. Weezie Davis, is an ophthalmologist and Peter's mother.
"I'd love to watch him operate, although I would get a little faint and I'd have to sit down from time to time. But he encouraged me, if he hadn't encouraged me to go to medical school I probably wouldn't had enough courage to do it," said Dr. Davis.
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Medical legend present to see his grandson graduate med school
A Caribbean medical school has offered Kern Medical Center 35 million dollars to have its students work at the county hospital, according to The Bakersfield Californian. The paper reports that the students, most of whom are American citizens, will come from Ross University, located on the Caribbean island of Dominica. The contract would span over a 10 year period and would give the students a ...
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about creativity. With its emphasis onrequirements and contrived benchmarks of success, medical school admissions might inadvertently be selecting for those who are skilled at jumping through hoops and weeding out more independent thinkers. I received comments from people who were so inspired that they wanted to discuss ideas about reforming the curriculum. Creativity is missing; how are we going to fix this? It was the epitome of irony to me: attempting to standardize the exact thing that refers to thinking outside standardization.
In this post, I hope to address my thinking about the subject in a bit more detail. I believe excessive curriculum mandates are a well-meaning but counterproductive approach to solving what we are aiming to solve.
The temptation to improve education through mandates is not new. Every few years, medical administrators, politicians, or some other Powers That Be decide an important quality that all doctors should have is not being taught, and that it must be standardized into medical education. Focus was first on mastery of the hard sciences, then turned to increased emphasis on compassion and communication. The latest has been a turn to the medical humanities, with endeavors such as visiting art museums and engaging in poetry-writing sessions becoming increasingly widespread. At the end of 2011, 69 of 133 accredited medical schools in the US required a course in the medical humanities.
Medicine is holistic a blend of science and art which those inclined to suggest reform rightly realize involves far more than repairing the human body when it malfunctions. The medical humanities, as a field of study, is invaluable. The question is: should it be required?
Fourth-year medical student Rhys Davies has reservations: Asking students to compare the role of literature in sickness between Broyard and Mantel is pointless unless they want to get something out of it, he writes. In fact, he says, its because he cares so much about the medical humanities (he is completing a thesis in it) that he opposes its obligatory presence in the curriculum. The setup is bad for everyone. Those not interested are miserable, and those who are have a mediocre experience tainted by the heel-dragging of their peers. As Davies puts it, Anything compulsory is duly attended but interest is notably absent.
That is not to say there is no worth in a well-rounded curriculum. There is value in exposing students to diverse ideas and activities, perhaps sparking new passions that never would have been discovered otherwise. There is something to be said for making students do things considered good for them. Mandate nothing, and people might not learn enough. Some need that extra push. They might gripe along the way, but then say after, Im really glad I did that.
But place too much emphasis on curriculum, and the downside is exacerbating a culture of excessive busywork at the expense of some of the most meaningful ways of learning. The knee-jerk desire to reform curriculum whenever a desirable skillset is identified is based on a particular assumption: that every skill is best learned through the medium of coursework. Unfortunately, that assumption just isnt true.
There is a wonderful ethics professor here at Harvard, Dr. Edward Hundert, who has written a lot about the informal curriculum of medical school. A significant transmission of culture happens outside classes, hospital rounds, and the like, he says, over meals or during carpool rides from remote clinical sites. From focus groups with students, he found that the vast majority of the situations the students described as most influential were conversations with no faculty present. He concluded: I have discovered just how little a role the formal ethics curriculum plays in the moral and professional development of our students and residents. We succumb to the mistake of emphasizing teaching, when what we really ought to focus on is learning.
That can occur in many ways. Dr. Faith T. Fitzgerald, former dean of students at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, understands this well. She boldlychallenged a request from politicians that more humanities coursework be added to the medical curriculum, explaining:[I was concerned that] the addition of required courses in literature, drama, sociology, music, and art might actually limit students opportunities to read, go to the theater, be with friends and family, and attend a symphony or museum. Even if they would not have done these things, she continued, the additional coursework would cut down on contemplative time, volunteerism in free clinics, hobbies, and sleep.
Requirements come withan inherent trade-off. With the medical part of medical school demanding enough, free time is a commodity. Soak up our time with mandates aimed to make us well-rounded people, and we have less time to actually do the things, outside the narrow confines of a formalized curriculum, that make us well-rounded people.
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MADERA -- Nothing was going to stop the Liberty-Madera Ranchos High softball team from a fourth consecutive Central Section Division V title.
After thunder cracked ominously in the distance during the national anthem, the Hawks' bats did some thundering of their own in a six-run first inning en route to a 10-0 win Friday over Selma (19-7).
Freshman Renee Ortega delivered the big blow with a bases-clearing double to right-center that put second-seeded Liberty (23-6-1) up 3-0 after four batters.
That relaxed the team and set the tone for the game.
"We've got some girls that had played in games like these, but we've got some that never played in one before so they were flat nervous," Liberty co-head coach Bob Barber said.
Ortega said patience played a role.
"I was waiting to see the right pitch to hit hard on the ground or a hard line drive," she said, "and I got it."
Randi Wallace and Caity McShane added run-scoring singles and the rout was on.
Junior ace Hannah Shevenell threw a two-hitter with 11 strikeouts.
Shevenell struck out the side in the first and fifth innings, and she did not give up a hit until Emery Green hit a bloop single down the left-field line in the fourth.
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Nobody called Sammy Bost out after she stole third and overslid the base, so the Liberty center fielder just kept running.
Suddenly, Bost found herself sliding across home plate without a throw, scoring the winning run that capped a shocking ending to the Maryland 2A championship softball game, and left McDonough feeling it was robbed of a chance at a state title.
I saw [a tag at third base], McDonough Coach Julie Snavely said. I told my girls [the umpire] missed the call, but youve got to move on. Its unfortunate that play ended the ballgame.
Bost stole two bases on the final play of the game, and the Lions scored three runs with nobody out in the bottom of the seventh inning to beat McDonough, 3-2, Friday night at Robert E. Taylor Stadium at the University of Maryland.
The win gives Liberty the first state title in school history; McDonough was denied what would have been its sixth state crown and second in four years.
I overslid the base and I was like Oh my god, Im not letting my team down right now, Bost said. I just got up and ... I was like Okay, Ill go home then.
The wild ending overshadowed a terrific performance by McDonough senior Jazzmyn Hayden, who took a two-hit shutout into the seventh inning and produced the Rams only runs with an RBI double in the first inning and a solo home run in the third.
The Lions opened the bottom of the seventh with two bunt singles and a walk before second baseman Rebecca Oneto hit a two-run single that tied the score and left runners on first and second with nobody out.
Catcher Natalie Gill missed a bunt attempt as Bost and Oneto attempted a double steal, and after the throw to third came in late, Bost slid past the base and appeared to be tagged out by McDonough third baseman Molly Simpson.
I didnt feel a tag, Bost said. I wasnt going to go back into a tag so I figured Id either get in a rundown or go to score.
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Liberty rallies for three runs in the seventh inning to win Maryland 2A softball title
The Opposition raised questions in the provincial legislature Friday over the decision to close the Wood Islands liquor store.
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U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. John de Jongh denied rumors Friday that he was arrested or detained while in Washington, D.C. this week.
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Virgin Islands governor denies rumor he was ‘arrested’ in DC this week
As a champion of legislation to modernize outdated health care practices, Rep. Doyle Heffley (R-Carbon) today applauded the state's announcement to increase state Medicaid recipients' access to specialist care by expanding coverage of telemedicine consultations.
"Telehealth provides cost-savings benefits to individual patients, family members and health care providers," said Heffley. "By expanding access to telehealth services, a greater percentage of the underserved across Pennsylvania will be able to access technological advances that promise better and more comprehensive delivery of health care."
Telehealth services are the use of telecommunications technologies and electronic information to support long-distance clinical health care, professional health-related education, public health, and health administration. Heffley's telehealth legislation, House Bill 1939, would allow all Medicaid providers who use telehealth to be reimbursed for their services.
The bill awaits consideration in the House Health Committee.
The state Department of Public Welfare began providing reimbursement coverage for consultations performed using telecommunication technology related to high-risk obstetrical services and psychopharmacology on Dec. 1, 2007. Under the department's original policy, the telemedicine consultation is provided to the medical assistance recipient during the course of an office visit involving the recipient's primary care provider who may be a physician, certified nurse practitioner or certified nurse midwife using telecommunication technology that includes video conferencing and telephone.
Several changes to the agency's coverage of telemedicine recently went into effect, including:
* Allowing all physician specialists who are enrolled in the program to provide outpatient consultations to medical assistance recipients using interactive telecommunication technology.
* Revising the type of telecommunication technology that may be used to provide a telemedicine consultation to require, at a minimum, interactive audio and video equipment, to allow two-way, real-time interactive communication between the patient and the physician at the distant site.
* Removing the requirement for telemedicine consultations to be performed during an office visit with the referring provider present, and will allow the recipient to access the consultation at an enrolled office site, the originating site, of the referring provider as well as other participating physicians, certified registered nurse practitioners or certified nurse midwives.
For a full list of the department's changes, visit its website at dpw.state.pa.us.
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(WTNH) --For more than a month the Connecticut Children's Medical Center hasn't accepted Anthem Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance.
Eighteen-month-old premature born twins Madeline and Brady O'Connell rely on their health insurance to cover continuous checkups. Brady is waiting to undergo a test that he needs.
Brady underwent surgery last year. He requires good health insurance because of the checkups he will need in the future.
"He's had hydrocephalus for over a year now and had multiple surgeries last year which we were under Anthem and the coverage was very good. However he needs precautionary checkups, including an MRI," said Brady's mother Sarah O'Connell. Sarah and Tim O'Connell canceled an MRI for Brady after they were notified their health insurer, Anthem Blue Cross-Blue Shield would no longer cover Connecticut Children's Medical Center.
"If something happens, he has a shunt installed in his head and it has a failure rate of about 50 percent with the first two years, so in any moment, it could clog, it could malfunction," said Tim.
"Their doctors and all their staff are amazing, so we really don't want to go anywhere else but I think if it happened in a moment's notice, we'd have to," said Sarah.
A reimbursement rate from Anthem for hospital services is 28 percent below the national average according to the CEO of Connecticut Children's Medical Center Marty Gavin. "I am confident it will be resolved. It is in the best interest for the children, Connecticut Children's Medical Center and Anthem," said Gavin. Aetna, United Healthcare and ConnectiCare recently signed on with new contracts. Meanwhile families like the O'Connells are caught in the middle, as the stress piles up.
"It's tough having a child who may have surgery in the future, but now to deal with the financial issues, it adds another layer, it adds more worry, it adds more stress," said Tim. Anthem issued the following statement which read in part "committed to working to ensure a smooth transition for their members that they have until June 1, to submit transition forms to continue care if they are undergoing active treatment."
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MONTREAL - Montreal health facilities from nursing homes to major hospitals are facing a surprise cut of $80 million to their budgets this year.
And, theyll face the same amount another $80 million excision next year.
The directive came from the Montreal Health and Social Services agency on April 26 as a result of provincewide belt-tightening measures aimed at reducing the provincial debt, as outlined in the budget tabled in March.
We know that the government is broke and that the health sector will be touched. No one is escaping the cuts, said Marcel Allaire, director of finances for CSSS Cavendish, which has been told to trim nearly $1.4 million from its budget of nearly $80 million before the fiscal year ends in March 2013.
We knew it was coming, but we didnt know how much, Allaire said.
Aimed primarily at administrative functions and personnel, the cuts are not supposed to affect services to patients.
Several people, however, told The Gazette that its not possible that budget cuts will not jeopardize care. Fewer staff may also put patients at greater risk of errors, critics warned.
I agree with the philosophy of having to optimize, but its not easy to do without compromising patient care, Allaire said. Its easy to cut services, its another thing to optimize and maintain services.
The agency directive sent shock waves among health officials across the island.
We dont want to scare people, but you have to read between the lines, said Brian Gore, head of professional services at Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre.
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Surrounded by Democratic and Republican legislators, Gov. Terry Branstad praised a bipartisan effort to overhaul Iowas mental health system Friday as he signed a bill implementing the changes.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, we dont see a lot of things done on a bipartisan basis, Branstad said during the bill signing ceremony outside the Black Hawk-Grundy Mental Health Center. Many legislators making up the Cedar Valley contingent in the Iowa House and Senate attended the ceremony, along with the bills floor managers, Sen. Jack Hatch, D-Des Moines, and Rep. Renee Schulte, R-Cedar Rapids.
The bill redesigns Iowas county-based mental health and disability system so services are delivered locally but administered regionally an approach that is already in place for Black Hawk County and its neighbors. The result will be a more economical approach that will better meet the needs of our people, said Branstad.
This redesign is about putting the needs of patients first, he added. This bill creates a system that balances availability, affordability and quality of care.
Under the new law, counties will maintain their property tax levy that generates about $125 million annually for mental health services. Every county will levy the equivalent of $41.28 per person in property taxes for mental health services, an amount that will be reduced over five years with dollar-for-dollar property tax relief from the state.
Some counties will have to increase their levies while others will reduce them to that per-person amount. It will cost the state an estimated $17.3 million to bring all counties below the amount up to the target.
This region is a leader for the state of Iowa and we hope the model for how mental health and developmental services will be delivered across our state, Branstad said during the ceremony.
Area counties piloted the approach in the spring of 2008 and formally combined into a region on Jan. 1, 2009, said Bob Lincoln, who coordinates Black Hawk Countys human services programs. The region started with five counties, he noted. As of yesterday, we are 13 counties.
Lincoln credited the elected supervisors in those counties for making the political decision to form and join the region. Being connected is the best way to deliver services, he said.
He cited the regions 10-bed crisis stabilization center, which works closely with psychiatric hospitals. It allows a place for patients who dont need hospitalization but need time to become medically stable and get the necessary support in place at home.
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Higher prices from hospitals, doctors and other providers are the biggest driver of rising health costs, according to a recent study analyzing billions of private insurance claims.
The report from the Health Care Cost Institute is the biggest study to date of privately insured patients. The study examined 3 billion health care claims from 33 million people insured by Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare during 2009 and 2010.
The study found higher prices in all four major categories of medical spending: inpatient, outpatient, doctor fees, and prescription drugs, with the highest increase in outpatient services.
Unlike other recent reports on health care spending, we find that the increase is mostly due to unit price increases rather than the changes in the quantity or intensity of services, the report found.
Insurance premiums are rising because health care spending is rising, according to Northwestern University professor David Dranove, a specialist in health care management, who worked on the report.
The study showed Americans paying more but using slightly less health care in 2010 than 2009, Dranove said. Outpatient visits and inpatient admissions declined in this period. The study found that part of the price rise was due to sicker patients requiring more complex treatment. Still, the biggest factor was the increase in prices.
One prominent explanation for the rising prices: the growing power of big hospital systems.
Providers around the country have consolidated and achieved a great deal of market power that enables them to demand higher prices from insurers, Dranove said.
That was one of the findings of a recent series in The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer. Prognosis: Profits found that North Carolinas big urban hospitals raised prices, posted strong profits and built up big reserves during the recession. Top executives enjoyed million-dollar compensation packages as they expanded, bought expensive technology and built lavish facilities. Hospitals also enjoy a perk worth millions each year: They pay no income, property or sales taxes.
The series found that hospitals raise their charges each year: Duke Hospital by 6 percent each year, UNC Hospitals by 5 percent. The hospitals are seldom paid the full charges because insurance companies negotiate discounts.
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Higher prices from providers drive health care cost increases
Enlarge Win McNamee/Boston Globe via Getty Images
President Obama is applauded after signing the health care overhaul during a ceremony in the White House on March 23, 2010. Then-Gov. Mitt Romney signs a Massachusetts health care overhaul at Faneuil Hall in Boston on April 12, 2006.
President Obama is applauded after signing the health care overhaul during a ceremony in the White House on March 23, 2010. Then-Gov. Mitt Romney signs a Massachusetts health care overhaul at Faneuil Hall in Boston on April 12, 2006.
From now until November, President Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney will emphasize their differences. But the two men's lives actually coincide in a striking number of ways. In this installment of NPR's "Parallel Lives" series, a look at one of those similarities: They both signed health care overhaul laws based on an individual mandate.
Health care has become one of the starkest contrasts between President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. And that's surprising, given that once upon a time they both came up with similar plans to fix the system.
Stuart Altman, a professor of health policy at Brandeis University, says the two men once occupied the same political space on health care.
"I would define Obama as a moderate liberal and Romney as a moderate conservative. ... Both of them came to the same conclusion," he says. They decided what was needed was a system "built as much as possible on the existing health insurance system."
Both men embraced what was considered to be mainstream health care policy thinking: maintain the employer-provided system but get everyone covered through an individual mandate a requirement to buy insurance.
From Victory To Problem
Romney went first. In 2006, as Massachusetts' governor, he talked about the state's mandate in decidedly nonideological terms: "We're going to say, folks, if you can afford health care, then gosh, you'd better go get it; otherwise, you're just passing on your expenses to someone else. That's not Republican; that's not Democratic; that's not libertarian; that's just wrong."
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Saturday May 26, 2012
BRATTLEBORO - With six state legislators under one roof, talk over breakfast Thursday morning included subjects as diverse as storm recovery, solid waste, wireless coverage and even a mention of Vermonts recent regulation of mixed martial arts.
But one topic -- health care -- surfaced repeatedly during Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerces legislative breakfast at the Brattleboro Retreat.
And as lawmakers grapple with implementing a single-payer system in Vermont, theyre also keeping a close eye on the legal battle over the national health-care reform law.
"I think theres an excellent chance it will be struck down," said Sen. Peter Galbraith, D-Townshend. "And that will affect what we do."
Galbraith made clear that he believes the Affordable Care Act -- a signature achievement of the Obama presidency, but reviled by many conservatives -- is rooted in firm legal ground. But he nonetheless predicts that the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments on the law earlier this year, will strike down the act for partisan reasons.
"I believe it will be decided politically and not legally," Galbraith said, later accusing the court of functioning "like an unelected legislature."
Vermont officials have been laying groundwork for a universal, government-coordinated, single-payer health-care system that could take effect later this decade. The legislature last month took another step toward that
Rep. Mike Mrowicki, a Putney Democrat, noted that officials also have been attempting to improve residents access to health-care facilities.
"A lot of what were doing and have been doing is not necessarily tied to federal action," Mrowicki said.
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Washington, May 25 : Detailed knowledge about your genetic makeup'the interplay between genetic variants and other genetic variants, or between genetic variants and environmental risk factors'may only change your estimated disease prediction risk for three common diseases by a few percentage points, which is typically not enough to make a difference in prevention or treatment plans, say researchers.
The study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers is the first to revisit claims in previous research that including such information in risk models would eventually help doctors either prevent or treat diseases.
'While identifying a synergistic effect between even a single genetic variant and another risk factor is known to be extremely challenging and requires studies with a very large number of individuals, the benefit of such discovery for risk prediction purpose might be very limited,' said lead author Hugues Aschard, research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology.
Scientists have long hoped that using genetic information gleaned from the Human Genome Project and other genetic research could improve disease risk prediction enough to help aid in prevention and treatment. Others have been skeptical that such 'personalized medicine' will be of clinical benefit.
Still others have argued that there will be benefits in the future, but that current risk prediction algorithms underperform because they don't allow for potential synergistic effects'the interplay of multiple genetic risk markers and environmental factors'instead focusing only on individual genetic markers.
Aschard and his co-authors, including senior author Peter Kraft, HSPH associate professor of epidemiology, examined whether disease risk prediction would improve for breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis if they included the effect of synergy in their statistical models. But they found no significant effect by doing so.
'Statistical models of synergy among genetic markers are not 'game changers' in terms of risk prediction in the general population,' said Aschard.
The researchers conducted a simulation study by generating a broad range of possible statistical interactions among common environmental exposures and common genetic risk markers related to each of the three diseases. Then they estimated whether such interactions would significantly boost disease prediction risk when compared with models that didn't include these interactions since, to date, using individual genetic markers in such predictions has provided only modest improvements.
For breast cancer, the researchers considered 15 common genetic variations associated with disease risk and environmental factors such as age of first menstruation, age at first birth, and number of close relatives who developed breast cancer.
For type 2 diabetes, they looked at 31 genetic variations along with factors such as obesity, smoking status, physical activity, and family history of the disease. For rheumatoid arthritis, they also included 31 genetic variations, as well as two environmental factors: smoking and breastfeeding.
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Genetic information may not significantly improve disease risk prediction
ScienceDaily (May 24, 2012) Understanding the genetic diversity within and between populations has important implications for studies of human disease and evolution. This includes identifying associations between genetic variants and disease, detecting genomic regions that have undergone positive selection and highlighting interesting aspects of human population history.
Now, a team of researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Israel's Tel Aviv University has developed an innovative approach to the study of genetic diversity called spatial ancestry analysis (SPA), which allows for the modeling of genetic variation in two- or three-dimensional space.
Their study is published online this week in the journal Nature Genetics.
With SPA, researchers can model the spatial distribution of each genetic variant by assigning a genetic variant's frequency as a continuous function in geographic space. By doing this, they show that the explicit modeling of the genetic variant frequency -- the proportion of individuals who carry a specific variant -- allows individuals to be localized on a world map on the basis of their genetic information alone.
"If we know from where each individual in our study originated, what we observe is that some variation is more common in one part of the world and less common in another part of the world," said Eleazar Eskin, an associate professor of computer science at UCLA Engineering. "How common these variants are in a specific location changes gradually as the location changes.
"In this study, we think of the frequency of variation as being defined by a specific location. This gives us a different way to think about populations, which are usually thought of as being discrete. Instead, we think about the variant frequencies changing in different locations. If you think about a person's ancestry, it is no longer about being from a specific population -- but instead, each person's ancestry is defined by the location they're from. Now ancestry is a continuum."
The team reports the development of a simple probabilistic model for the spatial structure of genetic variation, with which they model how the frequency of each genetic variant changes as a function of the location of the individual in geographic space (where the gene frequency is actually a function of the x and y coordinates of an individual on a map).
"If the location of an individual is unknown, our model can actually infer geographic origins for each individual using only their genetic data with surprising accuracy," said Wen-Yun Yang, a UCLA computer science graduate student.
"The model makes it possible to infer the geographic ancestry of an individual's parents, even if those parents differ in ancestry. Existing approaches falter when it comes to this task," said UCLA's John Novembre, an assistant professor in the department of ecology and evolution.
SPA is also able to model genetic variation on a globe.
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Nnew genetic method developed to pinpoint individuals' geographic origin