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November 3, 2015

The Undiagnosed Diseases Network of the National Institutes of HealthA National Extension

Author Affiliations
  • 1National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
  • 2Departments of Medicine and Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, California
 

Copyright 2015 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved. Applicable FARS/DFARS Restrictions Apply to Government Use.

JAMA. 2015;314(17):1797-1798. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.12249

In 2008, an Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP)1,2 was established within the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This program evaluates patients and families for whom medicine has failed to provide a diagnosis. Such patients have often spent years visiting medical centers and clinicians in different specialties across the country, accumulating large amounts of medical notes and test results, often at great emotional and financial cost. Indeed, patients who finally received a diagnosis through the UDP had spent 3 to 10 times more in physician consultation fees than consultations during their NIH evaluation (C. J. Tifft, written communication, 2015).

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