2020 Naming Convention Input - Disease

2 June 2020

Input on disease naming convention

@Cathy Richardson

Please post your final responses in the Country response table below. Discussion comments can be made as comments.

 Australia

 2/6/2020

I don't think it really matters... though consistency is good. For english language editions, it might reduce effort producing consistency locally.

Our local Editorial rule is "This is up to the judgement of the Author but in general, use "Disorder/Disease of X" for broad concept types (e.g. Disorder of head). For more specific conditions "X disorder/disease" is preferred.

Belgium

2/6/2020

We do have inconsitencies as well, but in general we use 'Disorder/Disease of X' as preferred for both Dutch and French

Sweden

2020-06-02

Agree with AU, looking at a few examples there seem to be natural language reasons for the differences in wording, e.g. for eponyms it makes sense to have a trailing "disorder" and for body site groupers it makes sense to start with "disorder". In our translation we try use terms close to the clinical practice, whenever we have access to specialist clinicians, so some variation is expected and is only really visible in pick lists. The order of words in a term have no impact when searching "partical match, any order" like e.g. in the browser.

USA

06JUN2020

This is somewhat reminiscent of the permutations created in thesauri (e.g., MeSH) for search purposes (e.g., "Cancer, liver" vs. Liver cancer) in the time of books. I also think that 1) consistency is good (e.g., when looking at a list of children, we should not have to jump between styles) and 2) it does not really matter which style we pick as long as we stick to one. It might be a good thing to select one style for preferred terms and use the other for synonyms, making sure we produce them systematically and consistently.

DK

2020-06-03

The order of the words in the Danish translation is pretty much in accordance with the us:PT's. In Danish, it seems accidental how the language has developed within different disorders. We could usually do one or the other. It would always be 'bacterial disease', 'virus disease' etc.

NZ

2020-06-29

Agree with Sweden and Denmark- bacterial disease of ... and for eponyms it makes sense to have a trailing "disorder". For body site groupers it makes sense to start with "disorder/disease".

Member countries without a CMAG rep