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Concept
Nosology
Summary
Nosology () is the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that are produced, and other factors. For example, influenza is classified as an infectious disease because it is caused by a virus, and it is classified as a respiratory infection because the virus infects and damages certain tissues in the respiratory tract. The more that is known about the disease, the more ways the disease can be classified nosologically.
Nosography is a description whose primary purpose is enabling a diagnostic label to be put on the situation. As such, a nosographical entity need not have a single cause. For example, inability to speak due to advanced dementia and an inability to speak due to a stroke could be nosologically different but nosographically the same.
Diseases may be classified by cause, pathogenesis (mechanism by which the disease progresses), or by symptom(s).
Alternatively, diseases may be classified according to the organ system involved, though this is often complicated since many diseases affect more than one organ.
Traditionally diseases were defined as syndromes by their symptoms. When more information is available, they are also defined by the damage they produce. When cause is known, they are better defined by their cause, though still important are their characteristics. This leads to a branching differentiation in which a clinical syndrome (pattern of signs and symptoms) can come to be understood as a nonspecific finding shared by a group of disease entities or endotypes. For example, concepts such as murrain and the grippe that were formerly undifferentiable to humans and thus understood as a single disease later can be logically unraveled as separate diseases with similar clinical presentations. Thus, nosology is dynamic, reclassifying as science advances.
Official source
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