Publications by authors named "Yuk Lam Ho"

Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain a wealth of clinical data stored as both codified data and free-text narrative notes (NLP). The complexity of EHR presents challenges in feature representation, information extraction, and uncertainty quantification. To address these challenges, we proposed an efficient Aggregated naRrative Codified Health (ARCH) records analysis to generate a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) for a comprehensive set of EHR codified and narrative features.

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Motivation: The increasing availability of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems has created enormous potential for translational research. Recent developments in representation learning techniques have led to effective large-scale representations of EHR concepts along with knowledge graphs that empower downstream EHR studies. However, most existing methods require training with patient-level data, limiting their abilities to expand the training with multi-institutional EHR data.

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Importance: The American Heart Association proposed Life's Essential 8 (LE8) as an enhanced measurement tool for cardiovascular health.

Objective: To examine the association of LE8 with risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) incidence and prognosis in veterans.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This was a prospective cohort study of US veterans enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veteran Program (MVP) between 2011 and 2022.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focused on identifying self-reported military and occupational exposures among Veterans, such as Agent Orange and chemical warfare agents, through the Million Veteran Program, which gathers health data from over a million US Veterans.
  • Over 500,000 participants detailed their military experiences, revealing significant differences in reported exposures based on factors like service era, combat deployment, and occupation, with Vietnam-era Veterans primarily reporting Agent Orange exposure.
  • The findings indicate that exposure patterns varied notably by demographics, with combat-related occupations showing higher exposure reports compared to healthcare roles, aligning with previous research on US military Veterans.
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  • * We found 17 genetic loci associated with sleep duration impacting lipid levels, with 10 of them being newly identified and linked to sleep-related disturbances in lipid metabolism.
  • * The research points to potential drug targets that could lead to new treatments for lipid-related issues in individuals with sleep problems, highlighting the connection between sleep patterns and cardiovascular health.
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  • Human genetic studies often lack diversity, which limits understanding of disease causes and health disparities.
  • The Department of Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program analyzed data from a diverse group of 635,969 veterans, revealing 13,672 genomic risk loci, with significant findings particularly from non-European populations.
  • The research identified causal variants across 613 traits, showing that genetic similarities exist across populations and emphasizing the importance of including underrepresented groups in genetic research.
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Obesity is a heritable disease, characterised by excess adiposity that is measured by body mass index (BMI). While over 1,000 genetic loci are associated with BMI, less is known about the genetic contribution to adiposity trajectories over adulthood. We derive adiposity-change phenotypes from 24.

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Background: Whether tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi) use is cardioprotective among individuals with radiographic axial spondyloarthritis (r-axSpA), who have heightened cardiovascular (CV) risk, is unclear. We tested the association of TNFi use with incident CV outcomes in r-axSpA.

Methods: We identified a r-axSpA cohort within a Veterans Affairs database between 2002 and 2019 using novel phenotyping methods and secondarily using ICD codes.

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Background: Post-COVID-19 condition (colloquially known as "long COVID-19") characterized as postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 has no universal clinical case definition. Recent efforts have focused on understanding long COVID-19 symptoms, and electronic health record (EHR) data provide a unique resource for understanding this condition. The introduction of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) code U09.

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Few studies examining the patient outcomes of concurrent neurological manifestations during acute COVID-19 leveraged multinational cohorts of adults and children or distinguished between central and peripheral nervous system (CNS vs. PNS) involvement. Using a federated multinational network in which local clinicians and informatics experts curated the electronic health records data, we evaluated the risk of prolonged hospitalization and mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients from 21 healthcare systems across 7 countries.

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The Phenome-Wide Association Study (PheWAS) is increasingly used to broadly screen for potential treatment effects, e.g., IL6R variant as a proxy for IL6R antagonists.

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Article Synopsis
  • BMI is a common measure of obesity that is influenced by genetics and lifestyle, and significant changes in weight can lead to negative health outcomes.
  • The study aimed to assess how variability in BMI relates to the occurrence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) events in two different research groups over several years.
  • Results showed that greater variability in BMI was linked to a 16% increased risk of composite CVD events among a large group of veterans, regardless of ethnicity.
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Objective: Development of clinical phenotypes from electronic health records (EHRs) can be resource intensive. Several phenotype libraries have been created to facilitate reuse of definitions. However, these platforms vary in target audience and utility.

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Electronic health record (EHR) data are increasingly used to support real-world evidence studies but are limited by the lack of precise timings of clinical events. Here, we propose a label-efficient incident phenotyping (LATTE) algorithm to accurately annotate the timing of clinical events from longitudinal EHR data. By leveraging the pre-trained semantic embeddings, LATTE selects predictive features and compresses their information into longitudinal visit embeddings through visit attention learning.

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  • A plant-based diet, particularly one that includes healthier foods, is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) among US veterans.
  • The study involved over 148,000 veterans and found that those with better plant-based dietary patterns were less likely to develop conditions like myocardial infarction and stroke over an 8-year follow-up.
  • Specifically, healthier plant-based diets corresponded with a 29% reduced risk of CVD, while unhealthful plant-based diets increased the risk by 12%.
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  • Many studies on atrial fibrillation (AF) and COVID-19 haven't distinguished between new cases and existing ones, which this study aims to address by analyzing data from Veterans aged 65 and older who were hospitalized with COVID-19.
  • The research found that among over 23,000 patients, 5.3% had newly diagnosed AF, which was linked to higher in-hospital (16.5%) and 30-day mortality (22.7%) compared to those with pre-existing AF and patients without AF.
  • Newly-diagnosed AF significantly increased mortality risks, making it a crucial prognostic marker for COVID-19 patients, though it's still unclear if managing AF can improve outcomes for these individuals.
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Background: Red meat consumption was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in prospective cohort studies and a profile of biomarkers favoring high CVD risk in short-term controlled trials. However, several recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses concluded with no or weak evidence for limiting red meat intake.

Objectives: To prospectively examine the associations between red meat intake and incident CVD in an ongoing cohort study with diverse socioeconomic and racial or ethnic backgrounds.

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Importance: A significant proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals experience post-COVID-19 condition months after initial infection.

Objective: To determine the rates, clinical setting, risk factors, and symptoms associated with the documentation of International Statistical Classification of Diseases Tenth Revision (ICD-10), code U09.9 for post-COVID-19 condition after acute infection.

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  • A study analyzed the effects of statin use on older Veterans (≥65 years) over an 8-year period, focusing on frailty as a potential modifier of outcomes related to mortality and major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE).
  • Among the 710,313 Veterans studied, statin users, both frail and non-frail, showed significantly lower rates of all-cause mortality and MACE compared to non-users, with a notable effect for both groups.
  • The results indicated that frailty did not significantly alter the benefits associated with statin use, leading researchers to suggest further confirmation through randomized clinical trials.
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  • The study examines the relationship between blood cholesterol levels and coronary heart disease (CHD) risk among over 4 million veterans, exploring claims of a U-shaped association.
  • Findings reveal a J-shaped relationship, indicating that while lower cholesterol levels (below 180 mg/dL) show flat CHD mortality risk, higher cholesterol levels significantly increase this risk.
  • The results support the lipid hypothesis, suggesting that lower cholesterol is linked to reduced CHD risk, especially highlighting that low cholesterol due to medication does not alter this association.
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Though electronic health record (EHR) systems are a rich repository of clinical information with large potential, the use of EHR-based phenotyping algorithms is often hindered by inaccurate diagnostic records, the presence of many irrelevant features, and the requirement for a human-labeled training set. In this paper, we describe a knowledge-driven online multimodal automated phenotyping (KOMAP) system that i) generates a list of informative features by an online narrative and codified feature search engine (ONCE) and ii) enables the training of a multimodal phenotyping algorithm based on summary data. Powered by composite knowledge from multiple EHR sources, online article corpora, and a large language model, features selected by ONCE show high concordance with the state-of-the-art AI models (GPT4 and ChatGPT) and encourage large-scale phenotyping by providing a smaller but highly relevant feature set.

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  • Obesity poses a significant public health challenge and is linked to high mortality rates, with prior studies focusing mostly on European populations.
  • This research utilized whole-genome sequencing data from a diverse group of 88,873 individuals, finding 18 new signals associated with body mass index (BMI) and highlighting a novel SNP prevalent among people of African descent.
  • The study emphasizes the importance of diverse genetic data in identifying new obesity-related variants, moving us closer to personalized medical interventions for this crisis.
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Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have underrepresented individuals from non-European populations, impeding progress in characterizing the genetic architecture and consequences of health and disease traits. To address this, we present a population-stratified phenome-wide GWAS followed by a multi-population meta-analysis for 2,068 traits derived from electronic health records of 635,969 participants in the Million Veteran Program (MVP), a longitudinal cohort study of diverse U.S.

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Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain a wealth of clinical data stored as both codified data and free-text narrative notes, covering hundreds of thousands of clinical concepts available for research and clinical care. The complex, massive, heterogeneous, and noisy nature of EHR data imposes significant challenges for feature representation, information extraction, and uncertainty quantification. To address these challenges, we proposed an efficient ggregated narative odified ealth (ARCH) records analysis to generate a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) for a comprehensive set of EHR codified and narrative features.

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