Evaluation of a functional medicine approach to treating fatigue, stress, and digestive issues in women.

Fatigue, stress, and digestive disorders are common among adults, especially women. We conducted a 28-week pilot study to assess the efficacy of a functional medicine approach to improving stress, energy, fatigue, digestive issues, and quality of life in middle-aged women. Findings showed significant improvements in many stress, fatigue, and quality-of-life measures. The treatment program increased mean salivary dehydroepiandrosterone levels and the cortisol-dehydroepiandrosterone ratio. Stool sample analyses suggested that these treatments reduced Helicobacter pylori infections. This study suggests that functional medicine may be an effective approach to managing stress and gastrointestinal symptoms.

The use of multiple dietary supplements.

Dietary supplements are widely used in the belief that they confer additional benefit to health and longevity. Most people take one or two supplements but some take far more. What evidence is there to support use of multiple supplements and how should we advise patients who are using them? This case report gives a framework to address this issue with patients.

Rapid resolution of intense suicidal ideation after treatment of severe obstructive sleep apnea.

Patients with insomnia may develop suicidal ideation; however, we know of no reports of suicidal ideation associated with obstructive sleep apnea. We report on a 74-year-old man who presented to his primary care physician with excessive daytime sleepiness, poor quality nocturnal sleep, depressed mood, and suicidal ideation with active suicide plans. An emergency outpatient psychiatry consultation was arranged. The patient declined psychiatric hospitalization. He agreed to a trial of continuous positive airway pressure, using a self-titrating machine, followed by an urgent sleep study. Polysomnography revealed an apnea hypopneaindex of 64, arousal index of 91 and minimum oxygen saturation of 65%. The patient's sleep and excessive daytime sleepiness responded to nCPAP. The patient declined antidepressant medication but had excellent adherence to nCPAP. Suicidal ideation and depression resolved promptly and at 4-month followup were in remission. Further studies examining the relationship among untreated obstructive sleep apnea, depression, and suicidal ideation are warranted.

Who makes the diagnosis? The role of clinical skills and diagnostic test results.

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: Advances in medicine have led to a multitude of diagnostic tests. The contribution of the clinical skills of the general internist in the context of all these advances is unknown. Our objective was to assess the relative contributions of clinical skills and diagnostic test results in arriving at a final diagnosis. METHODS: Records were retrospectively reviewed from 248 consecutive patients admitted to a general internal medicine hospital service during a 3-month period in 2000. All diagnostic evaluations that yielded the final diagnosis were recorded along with the date and time they were performed. Diagnostic credit was given to the evaluation that yielded the diagnosis at the earliest point in time. RESULTS: All cases had a firm diagnosis by 3 months after hospitalization. Of the 248 patients, 246 received a final diagnosis during hospitalization. The diagnoses were made by use of the clinical judgement of the general internist in 50.4% of the cases, a radiologic study in 31.7%, a blood test or culture result in 9.4%, biopsy findings in 3.3% and various other diagnostic studies (endoscopy, echocardiography, electromyography and electroencephalography) in 5.2%. Clinicians provided the correct diagnosis significantly more often than radiologic studies (P = 0.0015), which was the next most useful type of diagnostic evaluation. CONCLUSION: Although technology has become increasingly available in clinical practice, clinical expertise and skills are still important factors with respect to making correct, timely diagnoses in hospitalized patients.

A controlled trial of automated classification of negation from clinical notes.

BACKGROUND: Identification of negation in electronic health records is essential if we are to understand the computable meaning of the records: Our objective is to compare the accuracy of an automated mechanism for assignment of Negation to clinical concepts within a compositional expression with Human Assigned Negation. Also to perform a failure analysis to identify the causes of poorly identified negation (i.e. Missed Conceptual Representation, Inaccurate Conceptual Representation, Missed Negation, Inaccurate identification of Negation). METHODS: 41 Clinical Documents (Medical Evaluations; sometimes outside of Mayo these are referred to as History and Physical Examinations) were parsed using the Mayo Vocabulary Server Parsing Engine. SNOMED-C was used to provide concept coverage for the clinical concepts in the record. These records resulted in identification of Concepts and textual clues to Negation. These records were reviewed by an independent medical terminologist, and the results were tallied in a spreadsheet. Where questions on the review arose Internal Medicine Faculty were employed to make a final determination. RESULTS: SNOMED-CT was used to provide concept coverage of the 14,792 Concepts in 41 Health Records from John's Hopkins University. Of these, 1,823 Concepts were identified as negative by Human review. The sensitivity (Recall) of the assignment of negation was 97.2% (p < 0.001, Pearson Chi-Square test; when compared to a coin flip). The specificity of assignment of negation was 98.8%. The positive likelihood ratio of the negation was 81. The positive predictive value (Precision) was 91.2% CONCLUSION: Automated assignment of negation to concepts identified in health records based on review of the text is feasible and practical. Lexical assignment of negation is a good test of true Negativity as judged by the high sensitivity, specificity and positive likelihood ratio of the test. SNOMED-CT had overall coverage of 88.7% of the concepts being negated.

Data representation in healthcare: a design for a freely-available openly-developed international reference terminology for healthcare.

The importance of data representation in healthcare has been of concern for centuries. In the last fifty years there has been an increasing awareness of the need for formal representations of terminological systems. We propose that terminological system development should be consensus driven and the product of iterative open refinement in order to practically serve the needs of the healthcare community. The system of development and maintenance of such a system must involve recruitment of the best and the brightest in the medical community to take responsibility for insuring the accuracy and completeness of such an effort. We suggest a method for algorithmically building a starting point for such a reference terminology. Further we suggest a distributed authoring environment that would allow domain experts to contribute regardless of their location or language. Open intellectual contribution is the necessary ingredient for a consensus based international health reference terminology.

Guideline and quality indicators for development, purchase and use of controlled health vocabularies.

Developers and purchasers of controlled health terminologies require valid mechanisms for comparing terminological systems. By Controlled Health Vocabularies, we refer to terminologies and terminological systems designed to represent clinical data at a granularity consistent with the practice of today's healthcare delivery. Comprehensive criterion for the evaluation of such systems historically have been lacking and the known criteria are inconsistently applied. Although there are many papers which describe specific desirable features of a controlled health vocabulary, to date there is not a consistent guide for evaluators of terminologies to reference, which will help them compare implementations of terminological systems on an equal footing [Methods Inf. Med. 37 (1998) 394, J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 5 (1998) 503]. This guideline serves to fill the gap between academic enumeration of desirable terminological characteristics and the practical implementation or rigorous evaluations which will yield comparable data regarding the quality of one or more controlled health vocabularies.

Internal medicine resident satisfaction with a diagnostic decision support system (DXplain) introduced on a teaching hospital service.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine whether Internal Medicine residents would find the use of an expert system (i.e. Clinical Diagnostic Decision Support System) to be a satisfactory experience when used during a clinical rotation in the hospital setting. Resident willingness to use the instrument was considered to be of particular importance because of growing concerns regarding the educational experience of residents in the hospital. Thus, our first goal was to assess resident satisfaction with the tool, prior to widespread implementation. STUDY POPULATION: Residents on the General Medical Hospital Service at St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester, Minnesota STUDY TYPE: Prospective cohort study METHOD: We provided unrestricted access DXplain, a Web-based Clinical Diagnostic Decision Support System, to five general medical teams in St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester, MN. All residents were particularly encouraged to access the system during the evaluation of new admissions. Usage of the system was recorded electronically each time a user logged on. At the conclusion of the 2 month study period, a survey was sent electronically to each of the participating residents. RESULTS: During the study period, a total of 30 residents (G1 =20, G3= 10) rotated on the five medical services. 29/30 residents responded to the survey. 18/29 indicated that they had used the service, while 11/29 stated that they had not accessed the system. The resident's logged on 117 times to enter a case during the study period, with several entering more than one case per logon. The average number of log-ons per user was 2.4/week. Of the 18 who used the system, 15 found it useful (83.3%), 2 were unsure whether it was useful (11.1%), and 1 (5.6%) did not think it was helpful. However, when asked how often the system led the user to consider novel alternative diagnoses 13/18 (72.2%) responded "almost always to frequently" and 5/18 (27.8%) said "occasionally to sometimes". None of the users felt that the system "rarely" or "never" yielded additional diagnostic considerations. Seventeen out of eighteen users (94.4%) thought the system was "easy to use". When asked if they would like to have such a system regularly available 13/18 (72.2%) responded yes, while 4/18 (22.2%) were unsure. One resident said that they would not like to have DXplain available (5.6%). CONCLUSION: We believe the data reflect a significant level of satisfaction with the system among residents. Their recognition that it frequently led them to consider novel diagnoses suggests it had a positive educational impact.