To verify this diagnosis, Dr. Pasteur selects the primary symptom - high Toto cell counts and links back to the LifeLine. Sure enough Dorothy's LifeLine indicates that the last blood test showed a high Toto cell count of 81 and another anomaly, a high blood density of 7. This is a somewhat unusual situation so Dr. Pasteur decides to consult a digital library containing 231 million patient histories. She extracts four thousand cases of Munchkin Syndrome and trims the set to 308 cases of those with similar age and genetic background to Dorothy. In this Spotfire display, red points are females and blue points are males.
Size encodes blood density.
Chemotherapy is used only with women, dialysis is the favored treatment, interferon has only moderate impact,and surgery is seen as too risky. For high Totocell initial cases, dialysis has the highest Toto cell reduction for patients like Dorothy. However, Dorothy's family has a common genetic pattern of high blood density which may reduce the effect of the dialysis. Sure enough, a scan through the blood densities shows that those with high blood density do not do as well with dialysis. But Dr. Pasteur is an expert on blood density and believes that a blood thining treatment may make the dialysis more effective.