Dear developers of Open Targets,
Thank you for a fantastic platform!
I just stumbled on this by pure chance. It seems that Miscarriage (HP_0005268) has been classified as a ‘measurement’ on therapeutic area. Surely this must be wrong, doesn’t it?
Hi Lucie,
Welcome to the OpenTargets community! This is a fairly complicated question. From the disease ontology point of view, there’s a distinction between abortion and miscarriage:
While miscarriage is about the time of death, which is reflected by the hierarchy: it is a descendant term of age at death and prenatal death. These are temporal measurements, hence the “measurement” classification.
On the other hand, abortion is interpreted as a disease of the reproductive organ.
So, the two, seemingly interchangeable terms refer to the same event from the point of views of the two entities involved. Although this distinction is clear from the ontology point of view, it is a question for debate if it is widely accepted and followed by the scientific and medical community. If the answer is no, the same label should be applied in both places having the other term listed as synonym. As I’m not an authority in this question, I would suggest you to raise this question with the EFO team for clarification.
Please let us know if you have further questions!