title: The science of clinical practice: disease diagnosis or patient prognosis? Evidence about "what is likely to happen" should shape clinical practice.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Diagnosis is the traditional basis for decision-making in clinical practice. Evidence is often lacking about future benefits and harms of these decisions for patients diagnosed with and without disease. We propose that a model of clinical practice focused on patient prognosis and predicting the likelihood of future outcomes may be more useful.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Disease diagnosis can provide crucial information for clinical decisions that influence outcome in serious acute illness. However, the central role of diagnosis in clinical practice is challenged by evidence that it does not always benefit patients and that factors other than disease are important in determining patient outcome. The concept of disease as a dichotomous 'yes' or 'no' is challenged by the frequent use of diagnostic indicators with continuous distributions, such as blood sugar, which are better understood as contributing information about the probability of a patient's future outcome. Moreover, many illnesses, such as chronic fatigue, cannot usefully be labelled from a disease-diagnosis perspective. In such cases, a prognostic model provides an alternative framework for clinical practice that extends beyond disease and diagnosis and incorporates a wide range of information to predict future patient outcomes and to guide decisions to improve them. Such information embraces non-disease factors and genetic and other biomarkers which influence outcome.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Patient prognosis can provide the framework for modern clinical practice to integrate information from the expanding biological, social, and clinical database for more effective and efficient care.
authors: Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre, Research Institute for Primary Care and Health Sciences, Keele University, Keele ST5 5BG, Staffordshire, UK. p.r.croft@keele.ac.uk.
authors: Peter
authors: P
authors: Croft
authors: Douglas G
authors: DG
authors: Altman
authors: Jonathan J
authors: JJ
authors: Deeks
authors: Kate M
authors: KM
authors: Dunn
authors: Alastair D
authors: AD
authors: Hay
authors: Harry
authors: H
authors: Hemingway
authors: Linda
authors: L
authors: LeResche
authors: George
authors: G
authors: Peat
authors: Pablo
authors: P
authors: Perel
authors: Steffen E
authors: SE
authors: Petersen
authors: Richard D
authors: RD
authors: Riley
authors: Ian
authors: I
authors: Roberts
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Sharpe
authors: Richard J
authors: RJ
authors: Stevens
authors: Danielle A
authors: DA
authors: Van Der Windt
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Von Korff
authors: Adam
authors: A
authors: Timmis
mesh_terms: D003657:Decision Making; D003933:Diagnosis; D003951:Diagnostic Errors; D006801:Humans; D011364:Professional Practice; D011379:Prognosis
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