Charlson

Charlson is a surname of English origin, derived from the given name Charles. It has been used in various English-speaking countries and appears in historical and contemporary records across professions.

In medicine, Charlson is best known for the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), a prognostic tool developed in 1987 by Mary E. Charlson and colleagues to quantify a patient’s burden of comorbidity. The index assigns weights to a set of 19 medical conditions (including myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, cerebrovascular disease, dementia, chronic pulmonary disease, liver and renal diseases, diabetes with and without end-organ damage, cancer including metastasis, leukemia, lymphoma, ulcer disease, and AIDS/HIV) and sums them to produce a single score. Higher scores indicate greater comorbidity and are associated with higher mortality risk in various contexts. The CCI has been widely validated and adapted for use with ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM coding, enabling application to administrative data and clinical records. An age-adjusted version adds points for patient age, typically increasing the score with advancing years.

The Charlson index is widely used in health services research and epidemiology to adjust for baseline comorbidity when comparing outcomes across patient groups, treatments, or settings. It has inspired numerous variants and translations in different languages and healthcare systems, reflecting its role as a standard covariate in prognostic modeling and risk adjustment.