Implications for practice and research

• Collecting data about different physiological, psychological and sociodemographic factors is crucial to better understand the progression of multimorbidity, rather than single disease-oriented approaches.

• Factors that influence the development of multimorbidity seem to precede a subject’s engagement with health services, thus the implementation of preventive strategies should take place early in the disease trajectory, aiming to reduce inequalities between groups with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnicities.

Context

Multimorbidity is the concomitant presence of ≥2 long-term chronic health conditions in a subject, it is increasingly prevalent with the ageing process and leads to poor health outcomes.1 Previous research has mostly investigated patterns of multimorbidity cross-sectionally, without focusing on its longitudinal nature in terms of accumulation of deficits.2

Theoretically, multimorbidity progresses over time with transitions through various states corresponding to different …