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Monthly Archives: January 2018

Epidemiology and outcomes research

The EpiChron Cohort Study of Chronic Diseases and Multimorbidity

January 19, 2018 – 9:35 am

By Alexandra Prados Torres
I would like to share with you the profile of the EpiChron Cohort recently published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, a large-scale population-based study aimed at understanding how multimorbidity and the main chronic conditions appears and evolve in the population, and impact on health services and health outcomes. Created in 2010, it will gather information of the 1.3 M inhabitants of the Spanish region of Aragon until 2020. It has been developed by the EpiChron Research Group on Chronic Diseases from Aragon Health Sciences Institute (IACS) and IIS Aragón. This Cohort aims to study the problems associated to multimorbidity and chronicity (e.g., polypharmacy, low adherence to medical plan, increased risk of mortality, frailty, inappropriate health services use) and to identify risk factors (e.g., clinical, social, demographical) of negative health related outcomes. We also aim to study the evolution of trajectories of multimorbidity patterns over time and their impact on health outcomes with the final goal of developing predictive modeling tools. One key point of the project is to scaling up the knowledge in the area of chronicity and multimorbidity and to foster collaborations with other European and international research groups working in this area to conduct cross-national studies.
Besides the main characteristics of the EpiChron Cohort, this paper describes the data quality control process followed to ensure an adequate level of accuracy, reliability and appropriateness of data for research in multimorbidity.  Moreover, the main findings obtained to date are detailed in the paper.
The publication can be found in the following link: Prados-Torres et al 2018
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Others

Multimorbidity has become a Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) in 2018

January 11, 2018 – 9:24 am

By Martin Fortin
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) is the National Library of Medicine (NLM)’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity.
The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from the world’s leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE®/PubMED® database.
Until the end of 2017, the term multimorbidity was not a MeSH. The term was a subheading under the term comorbidity. As a consequence, a search for the term multimorbidity in PubMED yielded thousands of publications that included those using the term multimorbidity and/or comorbidity.
Starting in January 2018, multimorbidity is now a MeSH heading:
This will facilitate the indexing and search of articles on this subject.
We believe that the ever increasing number of publications on multimorbidity, which includes articles from those participating in this community, has led to the recognition of the importance of the term, and deserves a congratulation to all those who have contributed to making the term achieve this important recognition.
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