評論
打印
Science & technology
科技
Health data and privacy
健康數據與隱私
The pandemic has sparked a new way to study sensitive medical records
大流行引發了一種研究敏感病歷的新方法
On may 7th an article appeared on medRxiv, an online repository for medical research.
5月7日，醫學研究在線資源庫medRxiv上發表了一篇文章。
It showed, for England at least, the degrees to which sars-cov-2, the virus that causes covid-19, discriminates in its deadliness between various groups of people.
該研究顯示，至少對英國來說，covid-19的sars-cov-2病毒在不同人群中的致死率差別有多大。
Men are more likely to die than women. The old and the socially deprived more likely than the young, well-off and well-connected.
男性比女性更容易死亡。老年人和社會貧困人群比年輕人、富人和有良好關系的人更可能死亡。
Those with uncontrolled diabetes or severe asthma, more likely than those without.
糖尿病和嚴重哮喘患者比沒有糖尿病和嚴重哮喘的患者患病的幾率更大。
And members of the country’s ethnic minorities more likely than those of its white majority.
與占人口多數的白人相比，美國的少數民族成員更有可能患病。
None of these, even the first (for men are more vulnerable than women to quite a wide range of infections), is exactly a surprise.
所有這些，甚至是第一點(因為男性比女性更容易受到各種各樣的感染)，都不足為奇。
Even the finding that current smokers actually have a lower risk of death from the illness than do non-smokers, though superficially arresting,
吸煙人士死于新冠肺炎的風險低于不吸煙的人，雖然這個發現表面上很引人注目，
is in line with the results of other studies that used different methods—though a possible protective effect on asthma patients of steroid inhalers looks worth following up.
但它也與使用不同方法的其他研究結果一致——盡管吸入類固醇可能對哮喘患者起到保護作用還值得進一步探討。
But the actual results of this study are not really the remarkable thing about it.
但是這項研究的實際結果并不是其特別之處。
That, according to its lead author Ben Goldacre, a clinician and data scientist at the University of Oxford, is the method of analysis by which they were obtained.
根據該研究的主要作者、牛津大學的臨床醫生和數據科學家本·戈爾達克爾的說法，其特別之處在于獲得這些數據的分析方法。
Instead of extracting sensitive patient records from the databases of the company which manages them on behalf of general practitioners (gps, Britain’s network of family doctors),
該論文背后的團隊并沒有從代表全科醫生(英國家庭醫生網絡)管理這些數據的公司的數據庫中提取敏感的病人記錄，
the team behind the paper developed a suite of software that lets them run their massive analysis on the data in situ.
而是開發了一套軟件，讓他們在現場對數據進行大規模分析。
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