Comorbidity

In medicine, comorbidity is the presence of one or more additional diseases or disorders with (that is, or with) a primary disease or disorder; in the countable sense of the term, a comorbidity (plural comorbidities) is each additional disorder or disease. The additional disorder may be a behavioral or mental disorder.

The term can indicate either a condition existing simultaneously but independently with another condition or a related 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." However, in many medical examples, such as comorbid diabetes mellitus and coronary artery disease, it makes little difference which word is used, as long as the medical complexity is duly recognized and addressed.

In medicine, comorbidity describes the effect of all other diseases an individual patient might have other than the primary disease of interest.

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