There is growing evidence to indicate that comorbidity has an unfavorable effect on life expectancy of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), and significantly influences clinical decision making. Recently, Naqvi and colleagues evaluated the prognostic impact of comorbidity in MDS by using the Adult Comorbidity Evaluation-27 (ACE-27) scale, a measure of comorbidity developed for assessm...

OBJECTIVE To examine lung cancer survival and the impact of comorbidity in the Central Denmark Region from 2000 to 2011. METHODS We performed a population-based cohort study of lung cancer patients diagnosed during four 3-year calendar periods (2000-2002, 2003-2005, 2006-2008, and 2009-2011) in the Central Denmark Region. The Danish National Registry of Patients was used to identify 9,369 inc...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to elucidate the effects of immunocompromising comorbidities on treatment response and adverse reactions in older tuberculosis (TB) patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS The medical records of 182 patients older than 65 years with proven TB by positive culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and with available drug susceptibility tests were reviewed retrospectively. ...

BACKGROUND Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit cognitive deficits but whether these deficits are exacerbated by broad spectrum psychiatric comorbidity (i.e., comorbidity that is inclusive of disorders from different diagnostic categories) is unclear. A broad spectrum approach to psychiatric comorbidity is an ecologically valid way to capture the diagnostic heterogeneity inherent in psychiatr...

Preexisting comorbidity adversely impacts breast cancer treatment and outcomes. We examined the incremental impact of comorbidity undetected until cancer. We followed breast cancer patients in SEER-Medicare from 12 months before to 84 months after diagnosis. Two comorbidity indices were constructed: the National Cancer Institute index, using 12 months of claims before cancer, and a second index...

BACKGROUND The prevalence of comorbidity is high, with 80% of the elderly population having three or more chronic conditions. Comorbidity is associated with a decline in many health outcomes and increases in mortality and use of health care resources. The aim of this study was to identify, review and summarise studies reporting the prevalence of comorbidity of chronic diseases in Australia. M...

OBJECTIVE Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with high rates of psychiatric comorbidity. Existing theories consider comorbidity as a consequence of PTSD (model 1), PTSD and comorbidity as a consequence of shared factors of vulnerability (model 2), and comorbidity as a consequence of trauma-type specific mechanisms (model 3). METHOD To compare the explanatory value of these mod...

BACKGROUND Comorbidity is often mentioned as interfering with "optimal" treatment decisions in diabetes care. It is suggested that diabetes-related comorbidity will increase adequate treatment, whereas diabetes-unrelated comorbidity may decrease this process of care. We hypothesized that these effects differ according to expected priority of the conditions. METHODS We evaluated the relationsh...

INTRODUCTION The clinical outcome of geriatric patients with hip fracture depends on surgical management as well as other medical factors. This study aimed to evaluate the relationship between Charlson comorbidity score and in-patient, 30-day, and 1-year mortality in Chinese geriatric patients who underwent surgery for hip fracture. METHODS This was a historical cohort study conducted in a te...

The pivotal problem of comorbidity research lies in the psychometric foundation it rests on, that is, latent variable theory, in which a mental disorder is viewed as a latent variable that causes a constellation of symptoms. From this perspective, comorbidity is a (bi)directional relationship between multiple latent variables. We argue that such a latent variable perspective encounters serious ...