Other Interesting Book Sites-OMIM

Online Mendelian Inheritance In Man (OMIM) is a federally funded project that provides information on genetic syndromes. It is based in part on Victor McKusik's excelle nt book on genetic syndromes, but has the advantage of being continually updated. Clinical, historical, and genetic information is available, with hypertext links available to the abstracts of the cited references. This is perhaps the single MOST useful site for a neurologist as of 1998.

For example, should a neurologist see a patient with ataxia and albinism, a search of OMIM would reveal five disorders in which this combination has been seen, would describe the clinical and genetic features of each, and in some cases (e.g., Angelman syndrome) would provide images such as fluorescent in situ hybridization analyses and pictures of affected children.

For another example, let us say you had a patient with Alzheimer's disease, and wished to update yourself on the recent advances in apolipoprotein E4 alleles. You can hypertext to the above site and search for Alzheimer's. The OMIM search will retrieve Alzheimer's and other related diseases for you. If you hypertext OMIM entry # 107741 you wi ll have a relatively up to date text (updated within the last few weeks) of the genetics of Alzheimer's. This text will have hypertext references to Medline abstracts. Therefore you can readily access (at least in abstract form) any of the articles that have been referenced. Try it now, and return to this page when you are finished.