Xerostomia due [clinical finding]/caused by [substance]/[physical force] - new template for review

Bruce Goldberg , I am looking at this with a mind towards a remodeling of Xerostomia, which I think is a finding, primarily because it has been defined as "the subjective complaint of dry mouth" and can be modeled using an INTERPRETS/HAS INTERPRETATION and a finding site of 113277000 |Oral mucous membrane structure (body structure)|.  In most cases it is a clinical sign manifesting some other disorder of the salivary gland due to X.  Unfortunately we have had a long  history of making clinical manifestations of a disease a disease in and of itself.

I am also a bit concerned about the use of 79014000 |Dehydrated structure (morphologic abnormality)| since in "Subjective xerostomia" there is no apparent "pathology" associated with the membrane structures. This  makes the whole area pretty hard to model correctly and completely. Clinical xerostomia can  be measured by salivary flow rates, but it is still just a clinical sign. 

Unfortunately, if we went in this direction, it would require remodeling of the parent  78948009 |Disturbance of salivary secretion (disorder)| as a finding as well (which I think is appropriate).  There are a few other issues with this area of the terminology, but I am wondering if we actually need to have a template for this as we are only talking 8 concepts.

Jim, I was thinking along the same lines initially - defining xerostomia using an interprets/has interpretation RG but gave up because I was not satisfied with the available observable entities, most being function observables and I was not clear where we are going with those. Xerostomia is divided into primary (due to salivary gland disorder) and secondary forms (dehydration, abnormal saliva composition, due to therapies such as drugs and radiation, etc.) so an eventual model may need to be more complex.

For now maybe the simplest solution may lie with the revisions above. 

To address your last point which I am glad you brought up is what is the minimal number to needed to create a template? As I reviewing >12,000 association concepts , I frequently come up with only 1 or a small number of examples of modeling pattern. I think I may have asked Yong this question in the past and he told me to create templates for every pattern. I can see where having a template in place would facilitate the creation of similar concepts in the future. It would however simplify my work however if I only needed to review those patterns represented by a certain number of concepts. I may bring this up during tomorrow's call.

I will bring up the issue about when there is a  need for a template at the ed. policy group.