Comorbidity

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (July 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In medicine, comorbidity refers to the simultaneous presence of two or more medical conditions in a patient; often co-occurring (that is, concomitant or concurrent) with a primary condition. It originates from the Latin term morbus (meaning "sickness") prefixed with co- ("together") and suffixed with -ity (to indicate a state or condition).^[1][2] Comorbidity includes all additional ailments a patient may experience alongside their primary diagnosis, which can be either physiological or psychological in nature. In the context of mental health, comorbidity frequently refers to the concurrent existence of mental disorders, for example, the co-occurrence of depressive and anxiety disorders. The concept of multimorbidity is related to comorbidity but is different in its definition and approach, focusing on the presence of multiple diseases or conditions in a patient without the need to specify one as primary.