
Morbidity is any physical or psychological state considered to be outside the realm of normal well-being. The term is often used to describe illness, impairment, or degradation of health. Morbidity is often used in discussing chronic and age-related diseases, which can worsen over time and impact your quality of life.
What is morbidity and what does it mean?
Morbidity is the state of having a specific illness or condition. While morbidity can refer to an acute condition, such as a respiratory infection, it often refers to a condition that’s chronic (long-lasting). Some examples of common morbidities include:
What is severe maternal morbidity?
Severe maternal morbidity (SMM) includes unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short- or long-term consequences to a woman’s health. 1 Using the most recent list of indicators, SMM has been steadily increasing in recent years and affected more than 50,000 women in...
What is the most common form of morbidity?
Most Common Forms of Morbidity. The prevalence of chronic disease remains steady, but the infectious disease has had an uptick in recent years thereby increasing morbidity. In addition to infectious diseases, foodborne illness, associated infections and sexually transmitted diseases also contribute to higher morbidity among Americans.
What does more infectious disease mean for morbidity?
More infectious disease means morbidity numbers are rising. When an event or a disease causes more deaths than expected, it's called "excess mortality." COVID-19 is a good example of an illness causing excess mortality. In some hard-hit countries, data shows that COVID-19 caused 50% more deaths than were expected in a specific period of time. 4

Does morbidity mean unhealthy?
Morbidity is the state of being symptomatic or unhealthy for a disease or condition.
What does high morbidity rate mean?
Morbidity rate refers to the rate at which a disease or illness occurs in a population and can be used to determine the health of a population and its healthcare needs. Illnesses can range from acute to chronic, long-lasting conditions.
What does morbidity mean in medical terms?
Used in medical settings, morbidity means illness or disease and is not to be confused with mortality, which means death, and is frequently used in statistical reports.
Does morbid mean death?
Morbid and moribund may begin with the same three letters, but these words have different meanings and origins. Moribund, meaning "being in a state of inactivity or obsolescence," comes from the Latin word meaning "to die" (mori), while morbid ("grisly, gruesome") is from the Latin morbus ("disease").
What are the top causes of morbidity?
Morbidity trends Bronchitis, gastroenteritis and colitis/diarrhea, and influenza were consistently the top three causes of morbidity from 1960 to 1995. From 1996 to 2007, diarrhea and bronchitis remained within the top three leading causes of morbidity, while pneumonia replaced the original spot of influenza.
What are the effects of morbidity?
Morbidity refers to the consequences and complications (other than death) that result from a disease. COPD is now recognized as a multisystem disease with significant morbidity resulting in increased risk of hospitalization and death.
What are the types of morbidity?
The two primary measures of morbidity are incidence and prevalence. Incidence rates reflect the occurrence of new disease in a population. Prevalencereflects the presence of disease in a population.
What is the morbidity rate of a disease?
What is Morbidity Rate? The morbidity rate measures the portion of people in a specific geographical location who contracted a particular disease during a specific period of time. It indicates the frequency of the disease appearing in a population. Morbidity refers to the status of being ill or unhealthy.
What does morbidity rate indicate?
The morbidity rate refers to the number of people affected by a particular disease. This helps the health officials to make risk management and adopt national health systems according to the needs of the population.
What does a morbidity rate measure?
Measures of morbidity frequency characterize the number of persons in a population who become ill (incidence) or are ill at a given time (prevalence).
Which country has the highest morbidity rate?
BulgariaBulgaria. Bulgaria has the highest mortality rate in the world at 15.4 deaths per 1,000 people.
What does it mean to reduce morbidity?
Reduction of morbidity requires compressing the average period between these points and reducing the average level of morbidity during this period. The goal of compression of morbidity currently is being achieved in some areas.
What is the procedure for SMM?
After excluding blood transfusions, the next most common SMM procedures are hysterectomy (surgical removal of the uterus) and ventilation or temporary tracheostomy (us ing a machine or inserting a tube into the airway to help a patient breathe).
What is SMM in labor?
Severe maternal morbidity (SMM) includes unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short- or long-term consequences to a woman’s health. 1 Using the most recent list of indicators, SMM has been steadily increasing in recent years and affected more than 50,000 women in the United States in 2014. This web report updates our previous report by adding information about SMM for 2014, the most recent year for which data are available on a national level.
How much has SMM increased over time?
After excluding blood transfusions, the rate of SMM increased by about 20% over time, from 28.6 in 1993 to 35.0 in 2014.
Why is SMM increasing?
It is not entirely clear why SMM is increasing, but changes in the overall health of the population of women giving birth may be contributing to increases in complications. For example, increases in maternal age, 2 pre-pregnancy obesity, 3. 7 have been documented.
How much has the rate of hysterectomy increased over time?
The rate of hysterectomy increased about 55% over time, from 6.9 in 1993 to 10.7 in 2014. The rate of ventilation or temporary tracheostomy increased by about 93% over the years, from 4.1 in 1994 to 7.9 in 2014.
How many indicators are there for SMM?
Access the table which includes the list of 21 indicators and corresponding ICD codes used to identify delivery hospitalizations with SMM.
What is morbidity rate?
mor·bid·i·ty. ( mōr-bid'i-tē) 1. A diseased state. 2. The ratio of sick to well people in a community. See also: morbidity rate. 3. The frequency of the appearance of complications following a surgical procedure or other treatment.
What is the definition of morbidity rate?
See also: morbidity rate. 2. The ratio of sick:well people in a community. See also: morbidity rate. Synonym (s): morbility. 3. The frequency of the appearance of complications following a surgical procedure or other treatment.
What does "morbid" mean?
1. The quality of being morbid; morbid ness.
What is the GHQ-12?
General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12): It is a simple screening tool consisting of 12 items used to screen the population for the presence of psychiatric morbidity. On this scale psychiatric morbidityis defined as GHQ-12 score more than 3.
What does "suffering" mean?
The state of being diseased or suffering.
What is medtalk in medical terms?
Disease, illness Medtalk Any departure, subjective or objective, from a state of physiological or psychologic well-being
What is the definition of prevalence?
The prevalence of a disease in a particular percentage of the population; the number of cases of a particular disease per unit of population. Any departure, subjective or objective, from a state of physiological or psychological well-being. Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why is screening for maternal morbidity important?
Screening for and detection of severe maternal morbidity is an important step toward promoting safe obstetric care. The two-step screen and review process described in this document is intended to efficiently detect severe maternal morbidity in women and to ensure that each case undergoes a review to determine whether there were opportunities for improvement in care.
Why is maternal morbidity considered a near miss?
It also can be considered a near miss for maternal mortality because without identification and treatment, in some cases, these conditions would lead to maternal death.
What are the criteria for screening for severe maternal morbidity?
(1C) The College and SMFM recommend using two criteria to screen for severe maternal morbidity: transfusion of 4 or more units of blood and. admission of a pregnant or postpartum woman to an ICU. (1B)
What is severe maternal morbidity?
Severe maternal morbidity can be thought of as unintended outcomes of the process of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term consequences to a woman’s health. To date, there is not complete consensus among systems and professional organizations as to what conditions should represent severe maternal morbidity. Developing such a list in the future has clear utility. In the absence of consensus on a comprehensive list of conditions that represent severe maternal morbidity, institutions and systems should either adopt an existing screening criteria or create their own list of outcomes that merit review. Such lists may be based on the institutions’ evaluations of which adverse outcomes are consequential to their population. Table 1 presents an example of a list of conditions that represent severe maternal morbidity. In some cases, however, an identified morbidity actually may not prove to be severe morbidity after chart review 10. For example, if a parturient with complex congenital heart disease has a planned ICU admission to receive safe intrapartum care and does not ultimately require any significant intervention aside from observation, she would not be categorized as a patient with a severe morbidity. In contrast, a woman who develops acute heart failure requiring ICU admission and significant interventions to manage her heart failure would be considered a patient with a severe maternal morbidity. Identifying an outcome as a severe maternal morbidity does not suggest blame, nor does it mean that there will always be an opportunity for improvement. Reviewing such cases in detail to determine whether the morbidity may have been avoidable and whether it should prompt changes in systems for care provision is, however, a necessary and important step in efforts to ensure quality obstetric care. For example, although amniotic fluid embolisms are “unpredictable and unavoidable” 11, reviewing all such cases to evaluate responses to these unexpected life-threatening emergencies potentially can improve future responses.
What is the grade of Obstetric Care Consensus?
Recommendations are classified as either strong (Grade 1) or weak (Grade 2), and quality of evidence is classified as high (Grade A), moderate (Grade B), and low (Grade C)*. Thus, the recommendations can be one of the following six possibilities: 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, 2C.
What is a weak recommendation?
Weak recommendation, low-quality evidence. Uncertainty in the estimates of benefits, risks, and burdens; benefits may be closely balanced with risks and burdens. Evidence from observational studies, unsystematic clinical experience, or from randomized controlled trials with serious flaws.
What is sentinel event?
The Joint Commission defines a sentinel event as “a patient safety event (not primarily related to the natural course of the patient’s illness or underlying condition) that reaches a patient and results in any of the following: death, permanent harm, or temporary harm.” Simply screening positive for one of the two recommended screening criteria does not constitute a sentinel event. Instead, the Joint Commission noted that upon review of any case, the ultimate assessment may be that the case is not a sentinel event 14. For example, hemorrhage due to placenta previa would not qualify as a sentinel event because bleeding in this context is part of the natural course of the illness. As such, screen-positive cases or individual outcomes and diagnoses should not automatically be considered sentinel events. Context determined from detailed review is needed to determine if an individual case and outcome was correctly classified as a sentinel event. Just as the rate of ICU admission and transfusion of 4 or more units of blood should not automatically be labeled as sentinel events, their rates of occurrence should not be used as a quality metric. These screening criteria are the minimum recommended criteria and institutions may choose to incorporate additional screening criteria to highlight cases for detailed review at their own discretion.
What Is Morbidity?
Morbidity is any condition that isn't healthy. It can refer to mental or physical illness.
What is the difference between morbidity and mortality?
Preventing Morbidities. Morbidity and mortality are two terms that often get confused. Morbidity refers to disease states, while mortality refers to death. Both terms are commonly used in health- and death-related statistics . Hugo Lin / Verywell.
What is morbidity in health?
Morbidity is any physical or psychological state considered to be outside the realm of normal well-being. The term is often used to describe illness, impairment, or degradation of health. Morbidity is often used in discussing chronic and age-related diseases, which can worsen over time and impact your quality of life.
How can we reduce morbidity?
Ways to lower morbidity rates include increasing screenings and early diagnosis which would lessen the length and impact of the disease on a person's quality of life. These measures would also reduce complications and lower the mortality rates of certain diseases because early treatment is often the most effective.
What were the leading causes of death in 2013?
Heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes mellitus, pneumonia and influenza, kidney disease and suicide accounted for almost 75 percent of deaths in the U.S. in 2013. 2 . Seven of the 10 leading causes of death are chronic diseases and these morbidities increase your risk of mortality. 2 .
Why is it important to have regular check ups?
A critical step is to receive regular check-ups to promote lifelong health before any signs of disease occur.
What happens if you are diagnosed early?
If people are diagnosed and treated early, they may have fewer complications. Their risk of dying from an illness may also decrease.
What are the two terms used in epidemiology?
Morbidity and mortality are two terms that are commonly used in epidemiology. While they’re related, they refer to different things. Morbidity and mortality are often expressed as a proportion or rate. Morbidity is when you have a specific illness or condition. Some examples of common morbidities are heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
How is mortality expressed?
Mortality is often expressed in the form of mortality rate. This is the number of deaths due to an illness divided by the total population at that time. As with morbidity, mortality rate is often expressed in population units, typically as “per 100,000 people.”. Let’s look at a simple example.
What are the two ways morbidity data is presented?
You’ll often see morbidity data presented in two ways: incidence and prevalence. Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these.
What is the definition of morbidity and mortality?
Morbidity and mortality describe the frequency and severity of specific illnesses or conditions.
What are some examples of morbidity?
Some examples of common morbidities include: diabetes. high blood pressure (hypertension) heart disease.
Why is knowing if you have comorbidities important?
That’s because they can make a difference in the diagnosis, treatment, and outlook of an illness.
How to calculate incidence proportion?
It’s calculated by dividing the number of new cases during a specific period by the population at the start of the period.
Does Having Severe or Morbid Obesity Classify as a Disability?
The short answer is no. Although several persons with Severe or Morbid Obesity can have disabling health conditions that result from the Obesity and could qualify for Disability benefits, the fact is that most people who have Severe or Morbid Obesity are quite able to perform their work functions. Having Severe of Morbid Obesity does not automatically qualify someone for benefits.
What is morbid obesity?
The actual medical definition of morbid obesity is: “A serious health condition that results from an abnormally high body mass that is diagnosed by having a body mass index (BMI) greater than 40 kg/m², a BMI of greater than 35 kg/m² with at least one serious obesity-related condition, or being more than 100 pounds over ideal body weight (IBW).”.
What is the treatment for obesity?
They help to provide education, support and a plan to help people overcome the disease of obesity. Comprehensive morbid obesity treatment includes: Dietary modification: based on medical evidence. Physical activity: adjusted to the person’s needs and abilities. Behavioral modification: to help overcome unhealthy habits.
What is an obesity specialist?
An obesity medicine specialist is a medical provider who has studied the causes, prevention, and treatment of overweight, obesity, and severe or morbid obesity. These specialists have the time, training and tools for comprehensive treatment. They help to provide education, support and a plan to help people overcome the disease of obesity.
What does it mean to be morbid?
If the Oxford English Dictionary defines “morbid” as “an abnormal and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects,” the diagnosis of morbid obesity might sound rather ghoulish and scary. What exactly does the doctor mean when they tell a patient that they have morbid obesity? Should they be offended?
How can someone find an obesity medicine specialist?
How can someone find an obesity medicine specialist? They can do a general internet search, take their chances and hope for the best… or they can look for someone with appropriate training.
What are the health problems associated with obesity?
Some obesity-related problems come from the strain on the body while carrying extra weight such as: High blood pressure, congestive heart failure, sleep apnea, shortness of breath, nerve pain, arthritis, back pain, heartburn, leg swelling, varicose veins, and physical disability.
