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.