POSTED BY KARA GAVIN-U. MICHIGAN

“A new tool ‘scores’ patients with multiple chronic conditions. Those with higher multimorbidity scores have faster memory loss, a higher suicide risk, and a higher overall risk of death, researchers report.”

“Assessing the effect of chronic disease on a person’s health is important because 45 percent of all adults have more than one condition—and that figure jumps to 80 percent after age 65, says researcher Melissa Wei, a primary care physician at Michigan Medicine, who led development of the new scoring system, called the multimorbidity-weighted index, or MWI.

PROGNOSIS TOOL

“‘Multimorbidity scores’ can help doctors understand a patient’s overall prognosis—and can help identify special risks that people with multiple chronic illnesses face, researchers say.

“As reported in The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, people with higher scores had a much faster decline in thinking and memory abilities than those with lower scores, even though most of the chronic conditions included in the index had no direct relationship with brain health.”

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