Text mining for disease surveillance in veterinary clinical data: part one, the language of veterinary clinical records and searching for words.

The development of natural language processing techniques for deriving useful information from unstructured clinical narratives is a fast-paced and rapidly evolving area of machine learning research. Large volumes of veterinary clinical narratives now exist curated by projects such as the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) and VetCompass, and the application of such techniques to these datasets is already (and will continue to) improve our understanding of disease and disease patterns within veterinary medicine. In part one of this two part article series, we discuss the importance of understanding the lexical structure of clinical records and discuss the use of basic tools for filtering records based on key words and more complex rule based pattern matching approaches.

Adjuvanted influenza-H1N1 vaccination reveals lymphoid signatures of age-dependent early responses and of clinical adverse events.

Adjuvanted vaccines afford invaluable protection against disease, and the molecular and cellular changes they induce offer direct insight into human immunobiology. Here we show that within 24 h of receiving adjuvanted swine flu vaccine, healthy individuals made expansive, complex molecular and cellular responses that included overt lymphoid as well as myeloid contributions. Unexpectedly, this early response was subtly but significantly different in people older than ∼35 years.

Risk of thromboembolic disease in men with prostate cancer undergoing androgen deprivation therapy.

Objectives: To investigate the risk of thromboembolic disease (TED) in men with prostate cancer (PCa) on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), while accounting for known TED risk factors.

Materials And Methods: We assessed TED risk for 42 263 men with PCa who were receiving ADT compared with a matched cohort of 190 930 without PCa. The associations between ADT and deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or pulmonary embolism (PE) were analysed using multivariate Cox proportional hazard regression models, while accounting for previous PCa-related surgeries and the following proxies for disease progression: transurethral resection of the prostate, palliative radiotherapy and nephrostomy.

Risk and timing of cardiovascular disease after androgen-deprivation therapy in men with prostate cancer.

Purpose: Findings on the association between risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and the duration and type of androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) in men with prostate cancer (PCa) are inconsistent.

Methods: By using data on filled drug prescriptions in Swedish national health care registers, we investigated the risk of CVD in a cohort of 41,362 men with PCa on ADT compared with an age-matched, PCa-free comparison cohort (n = 187,785) by use of multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression models.

Results: From 2006 to 2012, 10,656 men were on antiandrogens (AA), 26,959 were on gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, and 3,747 underwent surgical orchiectomy.

Early safety assessment of human oculotoxic drugs using the zebrafish visualmotor response.

Introduction: Many prescribed drugs can adversely affect the eye by causing damage to the function of visual pathways or toxicity to the retina. Zebrafish have the potential to efficiently predict drugs with adverse ocular effects at pre-clinical stages of development. In this study, we explore the potential of using a semi-automated visual behaviour assay to predict drug-induced ocular toxicity in wild-type zebrafish larvae.

Inhibition of the Pim1 oncogene results in diminished visual function.

Our objective was to profile genetic pathways whose differential expression correlates with maturation of visual function in zebrafish. Bioinformatic analysis of transcriptomic data revealed Jak-Stat signalling as the pathway most enriched in the eye, as visual function develops. Real-time PCR, western blotting, immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization data confirm that multiple Jak-Stat pathway genes are up-regulated in the zebrafish eye between 3-5 days post-fertilisation, times associated with significant maturation of vision.