Methods for assessing comorbidity and its role in patients with cardiac pathology

Abstract

There are several different definitions of the combination of multiple nosology within one organism: comorbidity, multimorbidity, syntropy, and dystropy, etc. Comorbidity is an important component of pathophysiological processes, which has a significant impact on the course and outcome of cardiac diseases in patients. Therefore, in recent decades, researchers have been actively engaged in the problem of assessing the degree of contribution of comorbidity to the overall state of the body. For this purpose, a number of scales and indices of comorbidity have been developed, which allow estimating the burden of comorbidity on the underlying disease within certain groups of diseases. Consideration of comorbidity in routine clinical practice allows to increase reliable prognostic assumptions and correctly build a therapeutic strategy. As a result, it improves patients’ quality of life, allows them to achieve favorable outcomes, and most effectively prevents complications in patients with comorbidity. The assessment of comorbidity in cardiological, endocrinological, oncological, and neurological pathologies is particularly important, since they have the most general negative effect on the entire patient’s body.