Syndrome

In medicine and psychology, the term syndrome refers to the association of several clinically recognizable features, signs (discovered by a physician), symptoms (reported by the patient), phenomena or characteristics which often occur together, so that the presence of one feature alerts the physician to the presence of the others. In recent decades the term has been used outside of medicine to refer to a combination of phenomena seen in association.

In technical medical language, a "syndrome" refers only to the set of detectable characteristics. A specific disease, condition, or disorder may or may not be indentified as the underlying cause. Confusingly, even once a physical cause has been identified, the word "syndrome" is sometimes kept in the name of the disease. Subjective medical conditions are not supported by evidence of an underlying physical cause.

The term syndrome derives from the Greek and means literally "run together," as the features do. It is most often used when the reason that the features occur together (the pathophysiology of the syndrome) has not yet been discovered. A familiar syndrome name often continues to be used even after an underlying cause has been found, or when there are a number of different primary causes that all give rise to the same combination of symptoms and signs. Many syndromes are named after the physicians credited with first reporting the association; these are "eponymous" syndromes (see also the list of eponymous diseases, many of which are referred to as "syndromes"). Otherwise, disease features or presumed causes, as well as references to geography, history or poetry, can lend their names to syndromes.

A culture-bound syndrome is a set of symptoms where there is no evidence of an underlying biological cause, and which is only recognized as a "disease" in a particular culture.