Concept Ancestor

The CONCEPT_ANCESTOR table is designed to simplify observational analysis by providing the complete hierarchical relationships between Concepts. Only direct parent-child relationships between Concepts are stored in the CONCEPT_RELATIONSHIP table. To determine higher level ancestry connections, all individual direct relationships would have to be navigated at analysis time. The CONCEPT_ANCESTOR table includes records for all parent-child relationships, as well as grandparent-grandchild relationships and those of any other level of lineage. Using the CONCEPT_ANCESTOR table allows for querying for all descendants of a hierarchical concept. For example, drug ingredients and drug products are all descendants of a drug class ancestor.

This table is entirely derived from the CONCEPT, CONCEPT_RELATIONSHIP and RELATIONSHIP tables.

Field	Required	Type	FK Table	Description
ancestor_concept_id	Yes	bigint	CONCEPT	A foreign key to the concept in the concept table for the higher-level concept that forms the ancestor in the relationship.
descendant_concept_id	Yes	bigint	CONCEPT	A foreign key to the concept in the concept table for the lower-level concept that forms the descendant in the relationship.
min_levels_of_separation	Yes	integer		The minimum separation in number of levels of hierarchy between ancestor and descendant concepts. This is an attribute that is used to simplify hierarchic analysis.
max_levels_of_separation	Yes	integer		The maximum separation in number of levels of hierarchy between ancestor and descendant concepts. This is an attribute that is used to simplify hierarchic analysis.

Conventions

• Each concept is also recorded as an ancestor of itself.
• Only valid and Standard Concepts participate in the CONCEPT_ANCESTOR table. It is not possible to find ancestors or descendants of deprecated or Source Concepts.
• Usually, only Concepts of the same Domain are connected through records of the CONCEPT_ANCESTOR table, but there might be exceptions.