MeSH — Medical Subject Headings
Overview
MeSH is the controlled vocabulary thesaurus produced and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing, cataloguing, and searching biomedical and health-related literature. Established in 1960, MeSH is the indexing system for PubMed and provides a hierarchically organised vocabulary of approximately 30,000 descriptors as of 2024, covering diseases, anatomy, organisms, drugs, chemicals, biological processes, and research methodology.
Structure
MeSH is organised into Descriptor Records (main concepts) and Supplementary Concept Records (chemicals, drugs, rare diseases). Descriptors are arranged in a polyhierarchical tree with 16 top-level categories. The most relevant to neuroscience are: C (Diseases), covering neurological diseases and psychiatric disorders; A (Anatomy), covering brain structures and nervous system anatomy; D (Chemicals and Drugs); G (Phenomena and Processes); and F (Psychiatry and Psychology).
Relationship to Other Disease Terminologies
MeSH, ICD-10, SNOMED CT, and MONDO serve different purposes but overlap:
| Terminology | Primary use | Granularity |
|---|---|---|
| MeSH | Literature indexing (PubMed) | Moderate; optimised for search |
| ICD-10 | Clinical billing / epidemiology | High; codeable diagnoses |
| SNOMED CT | Clinical records / EHR | Very high; post-coordinated |
| MONDO | Cross-database harmonisation | High; maps all others |
| HPO | Phenotype description | Very high; symptom-level |
Connections
Resources
- https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/ (MeSH homepage)
- https://meshb.nlm.nih.gov (MeSH Browser)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (PubMed — primary MeSH-indexed literature database)