I attended a lecture today about addiction where the lecturer claimed that the American Medical Association requires that a phenomenon meet the following criteria to be considered a disease:
1) It must be progressive
2) It must manifest identifiable symptoms
3) It must occur chronically in affected individuals
4) It must be fatal if left untreated
That makes some things obvious diseases. Cancers, for example. There are many things that we consider diseases that do not fit these criteria, though. I believe that obesity, for example, is not officially considered a disease because it is not fatal. It’s correlated with many fatal conditions but isn’t fatal on its own. Most mental disorders fail to meet this criteria too. Anorexia is fatal if untreated, but anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, ADHD, learning disorders, conduct disorders, psychotic disorders, and dissociative disorders and many others are not. There is a pretty good case to make for alcoholism and some other addictions meeting these criteria. Disorders that are associated with suicidality, too, might qualify, like severe depression, and possibly “gender identity disorder,” though GID may not be progressive and so fail the first criteria.
January 21, 2011 at 10:14 pm
That both surprises me, and in my casual looking on the web, I can’t find a definition that backs that up.
Both 1 and 4 strike me as oddly limiting.
January 21, 2011 at 11:28 pm
I couldn’t find it either, though this from the AMA refers to at least some of them, in the arguments for and against obesity as a disease sections: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/no-index/about-ama/15495.shtml