Hello! We are the two 4th year medical students at University of Glasgow that have recently completed our student selected component (SSC) on multimorbidity research. We are following in the footsteps of Mia and Devansh from last year and we have updated the multimorbidity literature database for January-June 2023. We each then wrote a report on a subtopic of multimorbidity that interested us.

This year the categories have been streamlined to hopefully make it easier for everyone to find articles. These are:

  1. Epidemiology of multimorbidity and its outcomes (inc. health economics)
  2. Epidemiology of multimorbidity prediction and associations with multimorbidity
  3. Polypharmacy
  4. Interventions for multimorbidity
  5. Qualitative work – experience and perspectives
  6. Multimorbidity policy and editorials

As multimorbidity is such a growing problem worldwide I (Daniel) found the papers dealing with interventions to be the most interesting, specifically those using exercise as an intervention. The crossover with the research on frailty was something that I found particularly poignant with the ageing population. The biggest take aways that I had from the papers we found were from Bricca et al. (1) who demonstrated that exercise was a safe intervention in those with multimorbidity and despite people’s fears of injury they were in fact less likely to have a serious injury than if they didn’t! the next was from a paper by Fessler et al. (2) who showed that people with multimorbidity actually got greater benefits from exercise than people who did not hav multiple long-term conditions. I thought both had strong practical messages going forward, that exercise is really something that we need to take more seriously when recommending it to patients.

One area of study that I (Heather) found particularly interesting was food insecurity and it’s association with multimorbidity. There is a growing body of literature supporting a bidirectional link, and I found 5 studies exploring this. One in particular was of note to me as it proposed some interesting explanation behind this relationship. The study by Ansari et al. (3) looked specifically at a disadvantaged population within India and found that middle-age and male sex were notable risk factors for this relationship. It justified this with an explanation of how this demographic is often concurrently responsible financially for parents and children, and have a tighter budget to spend on food. This leads to a less nutritious diet, which often results in chronic disease and multimorbidity. I thought this was very interesting and insightful, and it explained socioeconomic disadvantage with ill-health in a way I hadn’t considered before.

 

The full results of this years search may be found here: Multimorbidity Publications Jan-June 2023

First published: 23 October 2023

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