Multimorbidity
DEMultimorbidität
Multimorbidity means having two or more chronic conditions at once, with no single one picked as the main disease, say if you have diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease together. (That last point sets it apart from 'comorbidity', which is centered on one index disease.) It climbs sharply with age. In rich countries, roughly half of adults over 65 live with three or more chronic conditions. Multimorbidity goes hand in hand with taking many drugs (polypharmacy), declining function, worse quality of life, heavier healthcare use, and higher death rates. It also strains single-disease guidelines, which were built from trials that often excluded these patients. In geroscience, it is both a key outcome of biological aging and a strong reason to target the upstream aging process itself, rather than chasing one disease at a time.
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