( actions to injury including inflammati...)Doctors closer to using gene analysis to help trauma patients

Traumatic injuries claim hundreds of thousands of lives each year in the United States. In addition, millions of patients are hospitalized, at an annual cost to society of more than $200 billion. Patients may face a long and difficult recovery period riddled with many potentially fatal complications along the way.

“What we have shown is medical professionals can collect blood and tissue samples from patients, process them at different institutions and get consistent results,?said Henry Baker, associate director of the UF Genetics Institute and interim chairman of molecular genetics and microbiology. “For any tool used in clinical medicine, it’s important that people are able to get the same answers wherever the tool is being used.?/p>

Genomic analyses took place at UF, the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Washington University in St. Louis. Overall data analysis was based at Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard Medical School.

Specially trained clinical personnel sampled whole blood and other available tissues from more than 200 severely traumatized or burned patients and 23 healthy individuals in an effort to correlate molecular markers with white blood cell behavior, and ultimately, with patient outcome. Studies in healthy patients were conducted at UF, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Rochester School of Medicine and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Patients with severe traumatic injuries were studied at the University of Washington at Seattle and the University of Rochester.

In the end, scientists could see dramatic changes in genes turning on and off in trauma victims compared with healthy people. Among the trauma patients, researchers say “analytical noise??differences attributable to the testing method ?was no
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Source:University of Florida