# 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 - relatedTo: [[SNOMED CT]], [[ICD-10]], [[MONDO]], [[HPO]] ## 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)