Pre-disease as a stage of the adjustment process

"Define the meaning of words, and you will free mankind from half of its worries. This aphorism by René Descartes comes to mind involuntarily when one gets acquainted with the theses of the XVIII All-Union Congress of Physicians "Pre-disease - Disease - Recovery" [5]. The concept of "pre-disease" is interpreted in different ways! There are "risk factors" and "hereditary conditioned enzymopathies", "preconditions" and "precursors" of disease development, "initial disturbances of functions" and simply "functional disturbances as a precursor of a disease", "incubation period" (of non-infectious diseases), "incipient (of noninfectious diseases! - S.V.) and "prodromes of a disease", "premorbid condition" and "preclinical stages", "disease pre-diseases" (diseases preceding the development of a disease! - S.V.) and, alas, much more and much more. All this, undoubtedly, is the result of the lack of a unified definition of the concept of "pre-disease", that is, its generally recognized content and distinctive features.