Relationship governed by the point of coding?
Dear Bruce
Thank you for allowing me to join the call the other night.
I have been trying to get my head around the example in the recent document below:
“As an example, consider the conjunction of coronary artery embolus and myocardial infarction. Clearly the embolus may resolve after treatment but the infarcted myocardial tissue will not and thus coronary artery embolus and myocardial infarction are not considered to be necessarily co-occurrent.”
I understand that ‘coronary artery embolus and myocardial infarction’ is considered an example of Causation 1 (and not Causation 2) because one state can persist after the resolution of the cause in this case - but there is something I don’t quite get.
I have been considering the recent exchanges [and obviously am not familiar with all the previous discussions] and have distilled my confusion into the attached diagram. This seeks to illustrate the course of a case of myocardial infarction due to a coronary thrombosis in the context of pre-existing atherosclerosis.
When a case is ‘coded’ this is done at the time of encounter between the clinician and the patient and thus the relationships between the notions of atherosclerosis, thrombosis, infarction and scarring will differ at the point of encounter. So in the emergency room the case could be coded as Myocardial infarction due to and co-occurrent with coronary thrombosis but once the thrombosis has been resolved one might argue that at that point the case should be recorded as Myocardial infarction due to coronary thrombosis.
Thus when faced with a request for a concept (out of context) which is a conjunction of coronary artery thrombosis and myocardial infarction I can not see why this is necessarily Causation 1 – I would have thought that the semantics of the concept has to come from an accompanying definition. Indeed in practical terms (when coding a reason for admission) I am not sure of the value of distinguishing between Myocardial infarction due to coronary thrombosis and Myocardial infarction due to and co-occurrent with coronary thrombosis; as this is governed by the point of coding in relation to the course of the disease. However I can see that from a terminological perspective (and analytical) expressing co-occurrence is valuable because it determines an is_a relationship of the disorder complex with both coronary thrombosis and myocardial infarction.
Any thoughts/clarification would be gratefully received.
Best wishes
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