In medicine, comorbidity—from Latin morbus ("sickness"), co ("together"), -ity —is the presence of one or more additional conditions often co-occurring 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.
Prognosis is a medical term for predicting the likelihood or expected development of a disease, including whether the signs and symptoms will improve or worsen or remain stable over time; expectations of quality of life, such as the ability to carry out daily activities; the potential for complications and associated health issues; and the likelihood of survival. A prognosis is made on the basis of the normal course of the diagnosed disease, the individual's physical and mental condition, the available treatments, and additional factors. A complete prognosis includes the expected duration, function, and description of the course of the disease, such as progressive decline, intermittent crisis, or sudden, unpredictable crisis.
Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a sudden inflammation of the pancreas. Causes, in order of frequency, include: a gallstone impacted in the common bile duct beyond the point where the pancreatic duct joins it; heavy alcohol use; systemic disease; trauma; and, in minors, mumps. Acute pancreatitis may be a single event; it may be recurrent; or it may progress to chronic pancreatitis.
APACHE II is a severity-of-disease classification system, one of several ICU scoring systems. It is applied within 24 hours of admission of a patient to an intensive care unit (ICU): an integer score from 0 to 71 is computed based on several measurements; higher scores correspond to more severe disease and a higher risk of death. The first APACHE model was presented by Knaus et al. in 1981.
The pneumonia severity index (PSI) or PORT Score is a clinical prediction rule that medical practitioners can use to calculate the probability of morbidity and mortality among patients with community acquired pneumonia.
There are several scoring systems in intensive care units (ICUs) today.
SAPS II is a severity of disease classification system. Its name stands for "Simplified Acute Physiology Score", and is one of several ICU scoring systems.
The Simplified Acute Physiology Score III is a system for predicting mortality, one of several ICU scoring systems. It is a supplement to the SAPS II scoring system. It has been designed to provide a real-life predicted mortality for a patient by following a well defined procedure, based on a mathematical model that needs calibration. Predicted mortalities are good when comparing groups of patients, and having near-real-life mortalities means, that this scoring system can answer questions like "if the patients from hospital A had been in hospital B, what would their mortality have been?".
The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease, or MELD, is a scoring system for assessing the severity of chronic liver disease. It was initially developed to predict mortality within three months of surgery in patients who had undergone a transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) procedure, and was subsequently found to be useful in determining prognosis and prioritizing for receipt of a liver transplant. This score is now used by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) and Eurotransplant for prioritizing allocation of liver transplants instead of the older Child-Pugh score.
The sequential organ failure assessment score, previously known as the sepsis-related organ failure assessment score, is used to track a person's status during the stay in an intensive care unit (ICU) to determine the extent of a person's organ function or rate of failure. The score is based on six different scores, one each for the respiratory, cardiovascular, hepatic, coagulation, renal and neurological systems.
CURB-65, also known as the CURB criteria, is a clinical prediction rule that has been validated for predicting mortality in community-acquired pneumonia and infection of any site. The CURB-65 is based on the earlier CURB score and is recommended by the British Thoracic Society for the assessment of severity of pneumonia. It was developed in 2002 at the University of Nottingham by Dr. W.S. Lim et al. In 2018 a new toolkit was presented on the basis of CURB-65.
The intensive care unit (ICU) is one of the major components of the current health care system. The advances in supportive care and monitoring resulted in significant improvements in the care of surgical and clinical patients. Nowadays aggressive surgical therapies as well as transplantation are made safer by the monitoring in a closed environment, the surgical ICU, in the post-operative period. Moreover, the care and full recovery of many severely ill clinical patients as those with life-threatening infections occurs as a result of medical intensive care unit.
Trauma in children, also known as pediatric trauma, refers to a traumatic injury that happens to an infant, child or adolescent. Because of anatomical and physiological differences between children and adults the care and management of this population differs.
The Baux score is a system used to predict the chance of mortality due to burns. The score is an index which takes into account the correlative and causal relationship between mortality and factors including advancing age, burn size, the presence of inhalational injury. Studies have shown that the Baux score is highly correlative with length of stay in hospital due to burns and final outcome.
The risk adjusted mortality rate (RAMR) is a mortality rate that is adjusted for predicted risk of death. It is usually utilized to observe and/or compare the performance of certain institution(s) or person(s), e.g., hospitals or surgeons.
Pediatric early warning signs (PEWS) are clinical manifestations that indicate rapid deterioration in pediatric patients, infancy to adolescence. A PEWS score or PEWS system refers to assessment tools that incorporate the clinical manifestations that have the greatest impact on patient outcome.
The UK Coronavirus Cancer Programme or UKCCP is one of the longest running UK pandemic research programmes to safeguard, monitor and protect individuals living with cancer from COVID-19 across the United Kingdom.
The volume of the heart's left atrium is an important biomarker for cardiovascular physiology and clinical cardiology. It is usually calculated as left atrial volume index in terms of body surface area.
In medicine, the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) predicts the mortality for a patient who may have a range of concurrent conditions (comorbidities), such as heart disease, AIDS, or cancer (considering a total of 17 categories). A score of zero means that no comorbidities were found; the higher the score, the higher the predicted mortality rate is. For a physician, this score is helpful in deciding how aggressively to treat a condition.
In medicine, the Elixhauser Comorbidity Index is a measure of overall severity of comorbidities, predicting hospital length of stay, hospital charges, and in-hospital mortality. The higher the score, the higher the predicted hospital resource use and mortality rate are. For a physician, this score is helpful in deciding how aggressively to treat a condition.
