BMJ  2008;336:1149 (24 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.39588.334630.DB

News

Undiagnosed diseases are focus of new NIH programme

Bob Roehr

1 Washington DC

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Patients who have confounded doctors with signs and symptoms that elude diagnosis are to be offered the expertise of hundreds of doctors in a unique programme from the US National Institutes of Health.

"Physicians deal with about 6600 conditions and 6000 of them are quite rare. Even common diseases have many subtypes," the institutes’ director Elias A Zerhouni said during a telephone news conference with reporters earlier this week. He said it was not surprising that many can go undiagnosed for years.

The programme aims to combine the revolution in tools and information at the molecular level with the expertise of the 1600 doctors at the NIH Clinical Center "to assist patients around the country and their doctors." It will add to the knowledge base by creating a phenotype atlas of disease.

"We are doing this now because of the advances that have been made over the last five years . . . [Full text of this article]


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