Poster: Chronic disease prevention: A Translational Bioinformatics approach

The socioeconomic transformations in the last decades and its consequent changes to societies lifestyle have increased the incidence of chronic diseases. Genomic medicine has suggested that the exposure to risk factors since conception may influence gene expression and consequently induce the development of chronic diseases in adulthood . Scientific papers bringing up these discoveries indicate that epigenetics must be exploited in order to prevent diseases of high prevalence, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity. According to Butte, the effective transformation of results from biomedical research into knowledge that actually improves public health has been considered an important domain of informatics and has been called Translational Bioinformatics. This paper proposes the ChronDiseaSSys surveillance system aiming to alert health professionals about human development problems. This system automatically discovers scientific papers relating chronic diseases to risk factors after analyzing patient´s clinical records. As a result, the healthcare professional will be able to create a routine setting up the best growing conditions. Since chronic diseases are a serious health problem world wide and lead the causes of mortality with 60% of all deaths, the results suggest that bioinformatics researches are able to directly benefit public health.