What's the difference between a syndrome, a disorder, and a disease?

What is the difference between a disease and a disorder, a condition, and a syndrome?

  • I'd like to throw in 'illness' and 'infection' into the mix. Is there any meaning to be derived from representing these terms using Venn diagrams? Also, do any of these terms have relationships to causal agents (e.g. are infections only caused by microbes, while illnesses could be genetic and/or lifestyle-related as well)? Is there a category for medically acknowledged 'problems' which require *only* behavioural/lifestyle-related treatment?

  • Answer:

    "Diseases" are specific things. They are labels for concepts of ill health in which we think we know that "mechanism A causes symptoms B." The titles for a story, you might say. "Parkinson's disease" is the title of a story that says that if you lose more neurons in deep parts of the brain than usual, you get this set of symptoms that can include tremor, rigidity etc. "Pneumococcal pneumonia" is the title of a story that says that these microbes called "pneumococcus" have infected your lungs, causing symptoms that can include cough, fever, etc. There remain a few diseases whose underlying cause we're not yet clear about. So in many such cases, we simply mention a symptom, preceded by the modifying word "essential" = "we don't know the cause." One example is "Essential Tremor." A "disorder" simply means something is not working right. Parkinson's disease is indeed a "disorder" of a part of the nervous system, because that part doesn't work right. My car has a vibration because there is a disorder of my wheel alignment. You get the drift ... SUPPLEMENT (since the words "condition" and "syndrome" were added to the  Question) A condition is a state of being. It can refer to how severe a disease is ("his condition remains critical");  to something that falls just short of a disease ("the condition of being poor"); how healthy someone is ("she is in great condition!"). There are a few other meanings, but these seem most relevant to health. A syndrome is a bunch of symptoms that often occur together. Many diseases can cause the same syndrome. For example, fever and a sore throat is a very common syndrome. It can be caused by diseases as different as bacterial pharyngitis, the flu and cancer of the larynx.

Laszlo B. Tamas at Quora Visit the source

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Dis-order - disturbed order. Our body normal works in an orderly fashion. Any anomaly/ aberration from the orderly state. Eg Mental Disorder; Menstrual disorder Dis-ease - A disordely or abnormally functioning organ or system. Acid peptic disease Condition - describes state of health. i.e. patient was in poor condition; Syndrome - consider that each of the above is a flower, and syndrome is a floral bouquet. Involved of multiple organs/ organ systems with specific symptoms and signs. AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)

Chander Asrani

Well, the relationships between related things like medical terms related to health and sickness could be presented in Venn Diagram for education/explanation purposes for sure. So if you'd represent the health and sickness as two circles they should be separated from each other as demanded by the negating nature of there existence nature. If you have one, then by default you don't have the other. Then when it comes to things inside each of these two circles, illness (sickness) for instance, you could look into descriptive categorical terms that were given to phenomenonae within it. Wether that was for causative agents, underlying pathological processes or clinical presentations, you notice scholars, righteously, grouped similar things together and each group was given a descriptive referential name. So you could start from the illness itself and say you have physical and mental illnesses. Then you go a step further down the ladder and say: the physical illnesses could be injuries, inflammations, masses .... Then take inflammations, they could be due to wounds, in fictions or burns... Then infictions (causally) could be bacterial, viral, ... Then you might notice that some symptoms (manifestation of an illness) could present in a specific way, that commonly, occurs together as to constitute a distinct clinical picture then you call this set of symptoms a SYNDROME. In another instances, you might be able to understand the underlying pathological processes that are resulting in those signs and symptoms and then you call that x DESEAES. And at times, you notice symptoms and and see signs of illness that definitely coney a disrupted physical or mental capacity or function without being able to find consistent and definite underlying structural deficits or abnormality then you call it a DISORDER. As you might have noticed, those terms are linguistic words which already has some relevant descriptive meaning to which the professionals added some technical meaning based on certain scientific observational perspective.    They all serve as a common communication language between scientists. Regards.

Abdullah Alduraibi

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