Morbidity and morbidity are statistical indices used in epidemiology to assess the severity of a disease.
- Morbidity (or morbidity rate) expresses the relationship between the number of patients and the overall population under study. Therefore, if a disease has a high morbidity rate in Italy, it means that many Italians are affected by this disease.
Morbidity can also be calculated in much smaller and highly specific population samples, for example by examining only those who live near a thermo-enhancer, or women over 50 years of age.
- Morbidity expresses the relationship between the number of patients registered in a given period and the overall population under study. It is therefore an index that can be superimposed on the previous one (it is not by chance that it is often used as a synonym for morbidity), but to which greater emphasis is given to the temporal element.
Morbidity is widely used in occupational medicine to calculate work activity lost due to a disease.
A cold, for example, is an associated disease:
- very morbid (or very morbid if the two terms are used as synonyms, therefore considering them as the ratio between the number of Italians suffering from colds and the total population of Italy)
- and low morbidity (if considered as the number of working days lost due to the disease, which being mild, does not generally prevent going to work).
