Editorial: Comorbidity Burden in Rheumatic Diseases

Frontiers in Medicine

Elena Nikiphorou¹ 

关键词: comorbidity;    multimorbidity;    rheumatic diseases;    rheumatoid arthritis (RA);    treat-to-target;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmed.2018.00197

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The growing need to deliver more tailored and holistic patient care for people living with long-term rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs), has marked the onset of a new era in rheumatology. The shift away from the RMD itself as the “index” disease toward a focus on the patient living with RMD along with other comorbidities i.e., multimorbidity defined as the coexistence of two or more chronic diseases in the same individual (1), has placed emphasis on the importance of preventing, screening, and managing comorbidities in order to improve patient care. The concepts of multimorbidity and comorbidity both refer to a patient with more than one disease, but from a different perspective and are not mutually exclusive or contradictory (1). Whereas, comorbidity focuses on the index disease, addressing the co-occurrence of any distinct additional entities, in multimorbidity no index disease is defined and all morbidities are regarded of equal importance. An increasing body of evidence suggests that comorbidities jeopardize the achievement of treat-to-target goals and are a barrier to optimal treatment outcomes, an observation primarily originating from inflammatory arthritis studies including those in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) (2–5) and spondyloarthritides (SpA) (6, 7).

【 授权许可】

CC BY