The purpose of this briefing note is to inform the Community of Practise of a proposal to inactivate the 19 concepts in the <<303109001 |Pathogeneses (qualifier value)| subhierarchy.
| Date created | 28 April 2026 |
|---|---|
| Action | For Information Only |
| Status | Open |
20260430 BN Pathogeneses (qualifier value)_ subhierarchy v1.0.pdf (112.4 KB)
This corner of SNOMED was inherited “as is” from the UK’s Clinical Terms Version 3 product in 2002, and has not changed at all since. Natively, in the final release of CTV3, it ended up looking like this:
There were, however, never any modelled relationships within CTV3 itself that used these values, nor have there ever been any in either the International Edition or its UK Extensions. Although the set of codes within <<303109001 Pathogeneses clearly relate to a high level conceptual framework for the categorisation of disease aetiology and pathophysiology that will be very familiar to most clinicians and medical students globally, it is both incomplete and overlapping with other parts of SNOMED that do at least part of the same thing…notably of course its immediate sibling subtaxonomy under 308489006 Pathological process (qualifier value), whose children are today referenced by over 30K inferred relationships.
Of course, that 308489006 Pathological process subtaxonomy also came originally from CTV3 (although it has been changed quite a lot since 2002):
It is however perhaps notable both that all the values below Pathological process had also already been added to CTV3 by 1995, but that Pathological process grouper itself was also only added in 1999. When considered with the similar dating of CTV3’s Xa9Ge Pathogeneses subtaxonomy, this points to an earlier state in CTV3 in which all the values from both groupers may have originally been in one list that, in 1999, was partitioned between pathogenesis and pathological process. More detailed explanatory archaeology is “challenging” after 30 years.
But on the basis of the above, I would support this inactivation.
Many thanks, Jeremy, for sharing the background of this subhierarchy.
