Science Times and Nosology

If it's Tuesday it's NYT Science Time day. Today an especially interesting article caught my eye. It's about reclassifying diseases using molecular genetic techniques rather than grouping them by signs, symptoms, cause or pathology. The classification of diseases, by the way, is called nosology.

The Genomic Nosology for Medicine group at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics has found that certain diseases that are apparently very different actually utilize similar metabolic pathways. For instance, it appears Duchenne Muscular dystrophy activates many of the same genes that are activated in heart attacks. So two apparently different diseases may be more similar than one might think. Currently, there are over 12,000 diseases classified by the National Center for Health Statistics. You can find them in the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases here.


If this is generally the case, it is a very important finding. It means that we should immediately start mapping which genes are activated or deactivated in every disease. In other words, create a diseasome database. This is not as difficult as it might sound. It involves obtaining diseased tissue or blood and comparing which genes are activated or deactivated with similar genes in normal tissue. It's a big, expensive undertaking, but not technically difficult. It is done using "gene chip" technology and some powerful computer analysis.

One of the main advantages of this information is that it would allow us to try treating seemingly different diseases with drugs already developed for other diseases. In the case of Duchenne Muscular dystrophy....maybe treatment with drugs developed to treat heart attacks might help if the molecular pathways affected are similar.