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Always happy to review papers on #multimorbidity, within and outside #suicide research. But I always see the same pattern of issues/errors: multimorbidity is not used only for physical health conditions. Could be for mental health. Could be used for both physical & mental health.
Multimorbidity doesn’t refer only to chronic illness but health conditions in general, even acute. Comorbidity is unfortunately used interchangeably, but this term always takes into account a primary/index condition. Multimorbidity doesn’t occur only in older populations.
Few helpful papers on all the above: Feinstein Alvan talked about the importance of comorbidity in 1970 and noted that a comorbid condition can affect the outcomes of an index disease https://doi.org/10.1016/0021-9681(70)90054-8
@valderas and colleagues in 2009 published a study explaining the comorbidity constructs and clearly presented when multimorbidity can be used https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.983
Almiral and Fortin in 2013 talked about the most used terms for concurrent diseases and clarified that health conditions are widely used in multimorbidity research as they do not necessary imply pathology as disease and illness do https://doi.org/10.15256/joc.2013.3.22
Our metanalysis on the role of multimorbidity and comorbidity in suicide/self-harm is still ongoing, otherswise I would gladly mention our study in this thread. Watch this space and enjoy your reading.
