Recently we released our pregnancy data content, accessible through various queries such as “pregnant 18 weeks” or “pregnant, fetus’s weight 5 lbs 4 oz”. To add to that data, we have created an Apgar score calculator and assessment tool.
The Apgar score is a value assigned to newborn babies within the first 5 to 10 minutes of life. This value is a quick assessment of the baby’s overall health based on 5 variables: the color of the baby’s body and extremities, pulse, reaction (e.g., facial expression, cry response) to stimulation of the nose or feet, muscle tension after stimulation, and respiratory activity. All of these variables can be described more simply as appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration. Not so coincidentally, the first letters of these descriptions form an acronym that corresponds to the physician who developed the scale, Dr. Virginia Apgar. More »
Ah, spring! The time of year when winter coats are exchanged for short sleeved shirts, space heaters for open windows, and winter colds for stuffy noses, rashes, and itchy or watery eyes. When suffering from any set of symptoms, misery often seeks company, and what better way to find out how many other people share in your seasonal symptomatology than through Wolfram|Alpha? By aggregating survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), our medical content team has put together a unique set of symptom-searching tools that will enable you to investigate all of the symptoms you may experience throughout the year. For example, by entering “sneeze”, you can immediately find that an estimated 960,000 patients complain of sneezing when they visit the doctor each year, and that marginally more male patients complain of sneezing than female patients.
There are more than four million births per year in the US alone. And just in time for spring, a time associated with new life, Wolfram|Alpha’s research team has introduced a unique set of tools to help soon-to-be mothers and fathers better understand what is happening to their developing fetuses throughout pregnancy.
One of the most common methods of monitoring fetal development is through ultrasounds. Besides providing first glimpses of the baby, ultrasound images also provide doctors and technicians with important information about the fetus’s physical development. This information is useful in helping doctors diagnose, predict, and potentially avoid complications further down the line in pregnancy. To find out the typical measurements of a fetus for a given gestational age (e.g. 21 weeks), try entering something like “pregnant 21 weeks” into Wolfram|Alpha.
For the gestational age of 21 weeks, Wolfram|Alpha can tell you the estimated fetal weight, the normal range of fetal weights, and the estimated dates of conception and birth.
The most fundamental mission of Wolfram|Alpha is to be the internet’s hub for all things computable. With this in mind, our medical data team has been combing through peer-reviewed journals, population-based surveys, and credible online health calculators to bring you the most complete, up-to-date, and easy-to-use library of medical calculations available anywhere on the web. This endeavor has been ongoing since the launch of Wolfram|Alpha more than a year ago, and can be demonstrated through queries such as “heart disease risk”, “male age 27, 175 lbs”, or “basal metabolic rate”.
Over the past couple of months, we have worked to implement over 20 new equations. For example, hematocrit levels outside the normal range are indicative of any number of health concerns ranging from dehydration to kidney disease. In circumstances where estimates of hematocrit are in need and only certain parameters are known, Wolfram|Alpha can be used to fill in the gaps and assess whether the estimated value falls within the normal range, given a number of personal attributes such as weight, height, sex, or age:
Calcium in the blood is also a very important indicator of various health conditions, including complications of various types of wounds, hyperparathyroidism, and even osteosclerosis. Given total calcium and serum protein levels, Wolfram|Alpha can estimate the blood concentration of unbound ionized versus protein-bound serum calcium: More »
A new medical diagnosis or drug treatment can often leave us with more questions than answers. A few weeks ago we introduced a disease dataset within Wolfram|Alpha that can be helpful for those wondering how their condition and treatment plans compare to those of other patients. Most notably, this dataset includes the fraction of patients within the United States that have been diagnosed with a medical condition in a given year. For each condition, Wolfram|Alpha has various levels of information, including commonly reported symptoms, co-occurring diseases, and lab tests used for diagnosis. Beyond this, Wolfram|Alpha also has carefully curated data on drug treatments. For example:
The data displayed from these inputs gives classes of drugs prescribed or administered to patients during health care provider visits. Wolfram|Alpha ranks the drug classes by the number of patients to whom they were administered. For example, “hypertension drug treatment”, initially shows us that, of all the patients diagnosed with hypertension, 25% were prescribed angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, 22% HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, 21% cardioselective beta blockers, 19% antihypertensive combinations, and 16% calcium channel blocking agents. (That’s over 100% total because some patients are prescribed more than one medication.)
Looking above the ranked drug table we can see that there are a handful of useful options. Click “Show drugs”, and the table opens up and displays a ranked table of brand-name drugs prescribed within each class. From this table, you can see interesting differences in drug-prescribing patterns between the sexes. For example, the angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor Lisinopril is more commonly prescribed to male hypertension patients than females, but looking further down the list, we can see that female patients are more commonly prescribed Enalapril than are males.
Wolfram|Alpha can also can also provide generic options for prescription drug treatments. More »