Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Database for Brain Disorders

IBM and the Brain Resource Company (Sydney, Australia) have recently released the "IntegNeuro" kiosk, a desktop lab that will allow trained practitioners to test patients for a variety of brain disorders from within a hospital or clinic, simply by matching the patient's data to a comprehensive international database.

Dr. David Dembo of IBM's health informatics unit is encouraging about shifting healthcare to a "proactive science" that utilizes data management technology to screen and diagnose a wider variety of patients.

"Because of our new understanding of genetic predispositions and having a database like BRC's where you have a comparator of normative function, we're able to predict which patients are likely to get a disease and therefore do pre-symptomatic testing and intervention," he says.
Information for disorders such as ADHD, dementia, Alzheimer's schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress and conduct disorders are already stored in the brain database. Developers are looking to add depression and head injury data next.

The hope is that such a large, comprehensive database will help to standardise clinical data and reveal specific markers for certain disorders, something that smaller existing databases are unable to do because of insufficient information.

The database can be helpful not only to screen at-risk populations, but also to customize treatments to specific biological and genetic profiles.

"If we have lots of data looking at people before and after medication, we can develop an evidence-based approach to determine who should go on a medication and, most importantly, who's responding to it," says BRC chief executive Dr. Evian Gordon.

For the full news article, see Australian IT (http://australianit.news.com.au).
Article: "Brain disorders put in order" (July 13, 2004).

To read more about the BRC IntegNeuro database, and other products in development, please visit their website (http://www.brainresource.com).