disease

[Melanie Courtot]

Hi all,

I was talking with James this morning and we were wondering how to
represent something that has a disease.

Currently disease is under disposition, which I understand as for
example any human being would have the disposition of having a cancer.
However it somehow doesn't seem strong enough to represent the case
when we actually know the organism has the disease.
How would I say "I used blood from mouse having a lymphoma"?

There currently are placeholders in the PA branch, for _disease course
and _disease stage. Do I then say my mouse is specified input of a
disease course process? How do I link the process to the specific
disease?

Thanks,
Melanie

[Bjoern Peters]

This was discussed at the infectious disease ontology workshop, and a
write up is here:

http://ontology.buffalo.edu/08/phenotype/Terminology_for_Clinical_Phenotypes.pdf


Briefly: The disease disposition inheres only in those humans / mice or
whatever that have some kind of physical disorder. For cancer that would
e.g. be to have some mutated cells that replicate abnormally. Those
cells could still be destroyed by immune mechanisms before any
clinically observable disease occurs. The disease course is the process
realization of the disposition, and is what I think you will want to
refer to. This would be something like:

blood derived_from (mouse bears cancer realized in disease course)

It will not be trivial to fill in specific diseases though. A mapping
how to differentiate lymphoma from other types of cancer has not been made.

- Bjoern

--
Bjoern Peters
Assistant Member
La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology
9420 Athena Circle
La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
Tel: 858/752-6914
Fax: 858/752-6987
http://www.liai.org/pages/faculty-peters