An unusual association of rare diseases

• DOI: 10.1007/s12682-010-0048-4
• Publication Date: 2010-07-15T07:44:08Z
• Authors: S. Segato; I. Arena
• Keywords: 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; 3. Good health

William Osler, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and author of the first widely used American textbook of medicine, believed that whenever possible, it is better to assign all of one patient’s findings to a single entity rather than to multiple diseases. Even if at first it is correct to attempt to identify one single disease able to include all the different clinical manifestations of patients coming to our attention, we should not rule out that the same manifestations could be the expression of different concomitant diseases. These events are not uncommon, especially when we consider frequent diseases; nevertheless, in clinical practice it is very unusual to detect extremely rare and non-related diseases in the same patient.