Individual differences |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
In medicine, a chronic disease is a disease that is long-lasting or recurrent. The term chronic describes the course of the disease, or its rate of onset and development. A chronic course is distinguished from a recurrent course; recurrent diseases relapse repeatedly, with periods of remission in between. As an adjective, chronic can refer to a persistent and lasting medical condition. Chronicity is usually applied to a condition that lasts more than three months.
The definition of a disease or causative conditon may depend on the disease being chronic, and the term will often appear (in) the description
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Chronic hepatitis
- Chronic leukemia
- Chronic arthritis
In health psychology emphasis is placed on helping people to come to terms with the lack of cure and to manage their condition as expert patients
Many mental health difficulties can also have a chronic course with limited prognosis:
Professional help is often aimed again at improved management of the condition and its impact, once curative efforts have found their limitations.
Nearly one in two Americans (133 million) has a chronic medical condition of one kind or another. However, most of these people are not actually disabled, as their medical conditions do not impair normal activities. According to this report, the most common chronic conditions are high blood pressure, arthritis, respiratory diseases like emphysema, and high cholesterol. That number is projected to increase by more than one percent per year by 2030, resulting in an estimated chronically ill population of 171 million.
- Acute (medical)
- Homeopathic theory of chronic diseases
- Chronic pain
- Course (medicine)
- Disease management (health)
|This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).|
<ref>tags exist, but no
<references/>tag was found