Implementing Cancer Registry Data With the PCORnet Common Data Model: The Greater Plains Collaborative Experience.

Purpose: Electronic health records (EHRs) comprise a rich source of real-world data for cancer studies, but they often lack critical structured data elements such as diagnosis date and disease stage. Fortunately, such concepts are available from hospital cancer registries. We describe experiences from integrating cancer registry data with EHR and billing data in an interoperable data model across a multisite clinical research network.

The effect of number of healthcare visits on study sample selection in electronic health record data.

Introduction: Few studies have addressed how to select a study sample when using electronic health record (EHR) data.

Objective: To examine how changing criterion for number of visits in EHR data required for inclusion in a study sample would impact one basic epidemiologic measure: estimates of disease period prevalence.

Methods: Year 2016 EHR data from three Midwestern health systems (Northwestern Medicine in Illinois, University of Iowa Health Care, and Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, all regional tertiary health care systems including hospitals and clinics) was used to examine how alternate definitions of the study sample, based on number of healthcare visits in one year, affected measures of disease period prevalence.

Sequencing of the rat genome and databases.

The rat is an important system for modeling human disease. Four years ago, the rich 150-year history of rat research was transformed by the sequencing and annotation of the rat genome, ushering in an era of exceptional opportunity for identifying genes and pathways underlying disease phenotypes. With the genome sequence in place, there is the prospect of not only linking the extensive literature of mechanistic and pharmacological studies in the rat to its genome, but by using comparative genomics to other organisms as well.

Hormone-induced protection against mammary tumorigenesis is conserved in multiple rat strains and identifies a core gene expression signature induced by pregnancy.

Women who have their first child early in life have a substantially lower lifetime risk of breast cancer. The mechanism for this is unknown. Similar to humans, rats exhibit parity-induced protection against mammary tumorigenesis.

Genomic analysis of early murine mammary gland development using novel probe-level algorithms.

We describe a novel algorithm (ChipStat) for detecting gene-expression changes utilizing probe-level comparisons of replicate Affymetrix oligonucleotide microarray data. A combined detection approach is shown to yield greater sensitivity than a number of widely used methodologies including SAM, dChip and logit-T. Using this approach, we identify alterations in functional pathways during murine neonatal-pubertal mammary development that include the coordinate upregulation of major urinary proteins and the downregulation of loci exhibiting reciprocal imprinting.