A component cause of a
disease
A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical conditions that a ...
is an event required for the disease to develop.
Given a disease or medical condition, there is a causality chain of events from the first event to the appearance of the
clinical disease
In epidemiology, a clinical case definition, a clinical definition, or simply a case definition lists the clinical criteria by which public health professionals determine whether a person's illness is included as a ''case'' in an outbreak investiga ...
A cause of a disease event is an event that preceded the disease event in a disease causal chain. Without this
antecedent event the disease event either would not have occurred at all or would not have occurred until some later time. However, no specific event is sufficient by itself to produce disease. Hence such an event is a component of a
sufficient cause.
See also
*
Sufficient cause of the disease.
References
External links
Rothman and Greenland
Cause (medicine)
{{disease-stub