MeSH 2026 Update: New and Replaced Medical Subject Headings, 2023-2026

A 2023-2026 update report for the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) controlled vocabulary, listing new descriptors and supplementary concept records. The data includes new terms, replacements for deleted terms, and new entry combinations, compiled by datadiscovery.nlm.nih.gov. The report was last updated on February 10, 2026.

Use Cases

• Update a biomedical search engine index by mapping new PREFERRED_TERM and ENTRY_TERMS to existing content.
• Analyze terminology evolution by tracking changes in TREE_NUMBERS and DESCRIPTOR_CLASS over the Year column.
• Build a synonym expansion dictionary for text mining using the PREFERRED_TERM, ENTRY_TERMS, and SYNONYMS columns.
• Validate new medical coding by checking UI (Unique Identifier) and PREFERRED_TERM_FIELD against legacy systems.

Strengths

• Covers a multi-year update cycle from 2023 to 2026, providing longitudinal change tracking.
• Includes multiple structured fields (UI, TREE_NUMBERS, DESCRIPTOR_CLASS) for precise term identification and classification.
• Available in multiple machine-readable formats including CSV, JSON, XML, and RDF.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

datadiscovery.nlm.nih.gov

Collection Method

Likely an official extract from the National Library of Medicine's MeSH maintenance process.

Time Range

Covers changes from 2023 to the 2026 release.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-02-10 20:37:33; freshness should be verified.