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Concept
Comorbidity
Summary
In medicine, comorbidity - from Latin morbus ("sickness"), co ("together"), -ity (as if - several sicknesses together) - is the presence of one or more additional conditions often co-occurring (that is, concomitant or concurrent) with a primary condition. Comorbidity describes the effect of all other conditions an individual patient might have other than the primary condition of interest, and can be physiological or psychological. In the context of mental health, comorbidity often refers to disorders that are often coexistent with each other, such as depression and anxiety disorders. The concept of multimorbidity is related to comorbidity but presents a different meaning and approach.
The term "comorbid" has three definitions:
to indicate a medical condition existing simultaneously but independently with another condition in a patient.
to indicate a medical condition in a patient that causes, is caused by, or is otherwise related to another condition in the same patient.
to indicate two or more medical conditions existing simultaneously regardless of their causal relationship.
Comorbidity can indicate either a condition existing simultaneously, but independently with another condition or a related derivative medical condition. The latter sense of the term causes some overlap with the concept of complications. For example, in longstanding diabetes mellitus, the extent to which coronary artery disease is an independent comorbidity versus a diabetic complication is not easy to measure, because both diseases are quite multivariate and there are likely aspects of both simultaneity and consequence. The same is true of intercurrent diseases in pregnancy. In other examples, the true independence or relation is not ascertainable because syndromes and associations are often identified long before pathogenetic commonalities are confirmed (and, in some examples, before they are even hypothesized). In psychiatric diagnoses it has been argued in part that this "'use of imprecise language may lead to correspondingly imprecise thinking', [and] this usage of the term 'comorbidity' should probably be avoided.
Official source
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