Morbidity
Say it: mor-BID-ih-tee
Morbidity is the state of having a disease, injury or disability, and also the amount of illness in a population, measured by incidence and prevalence.
Also: morbidities
Definition
What is morbidity?
Morbidity refers to illness rather than death. For an individual, it means having a disease, a symptom of disease, an injury or a disability, and in clinical writing it also covers harm caused by a treatment, as in the morbidity of an operation. For a population, it describes how much ill health is present. A related word, comorbidity, means two or more conditions occurring in the same person.
Epidemiologists measure morbidity in two main ways. Incidence counts new cases arising in a population at risk over a period, and prevalence counts all existing cases at one time or over a period. Either can be reported as a raw number or as a rate per 100,000 people, which allows fair comparison between populations of different sizes. The data come from disease notification systems, hospital records, registries and health surveys.
Morbidity and mortality together describe the burden of a disease. Conditions such as arthritis, depression and chronic back pain cause a great deal of morbidity but relatively few deaths, which is why combined measures such as the disability-adjusted life year were developed. The pairing also appears in the title of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Word parts
Where does the word “morbidity” come from?
- morb-
- disease, sicknessLatin morbus
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Terms that go with it
- Mortality rateA mortality rate is how often death occurs in a defined population over a set period, usually given as deaths per 1,000 or 100,000 people.
- IncidenceIncidence is the number of new cases of a disease that arise in a population at risk during a specified period of time.
- PrevalencePrevalence is the share of a population living with a particular disease or condition, either at one point in time or across a set period.
- Disability-adjusted life yearA disability-adjusted life year (DALY) equals one year of healthy life lost, counting both early death and time spent living with illness or disability.
- EpidemiologyEpidemiology is the study of how often diseases and other health events occur in populations, what causes them and how they can be controlled.
- Public healthPublic health is the science and practice of preventing disease and injury and promoting health across whole communities rather than individual patients.
Sources
Checked against
Written for biofideX in plain words, after checking these references:
- NCI Dictionary of Cancer Terms: morbidity
- CDC Principles of Epidemiology, Lesson 3 Section 2: Morbidity Frequency Measures
- OpenStax Microbiology, 16.1 The Language of Epidemiologists
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