|
Prognosis
Prognosis ( Greek: πρόγνωσις "fore-knowing, foreseeing"; : prognoses) is a medical term for predicting the likelihood or expected development of a disease, including whether the signs and symptoms will improve or worsen (and how quickly) or remain stable over time; expectations of quality of life, such as the ability to carry out daily activities; the potential for complications and associated health issues; and the likelihood of survival (including life expectancy). A prognosis is made on the basis of the normal course of the diagnosed disease, the individual's physical and mental condition, the available treatments, and additional factors. A complete prognosis includes the expected duration, function, and description of the course of the disease, such as progressive decline, intermittent crisis, or sudden, unpredictable crisis. When applied to large statistical populations, prognostic estimates can be very accurate: for example the statement "45% of patients with severe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic period (), and the Classical period (). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. From the Hellenistic period (), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek, which is regarded as a separate historical stage, although its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek, of which Attic Greek developed into Koine. Dia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advance Care Planning
Advance care planning is a process that enables individuals to make plans about their future health care. Advance care plans provide direction to healthcare professionals when a person is not in a position to make and/or communicate their own healthcare choices. Advance care planning is applicable to adults at all stages of life. Participation in advance care planning has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety for patients and their families, and lead to improvements in end of life care. Older adults are more directly concerned as they may experience a situation where advance care planning can be useful. However, a minority use them. A research conducted in Switzerland with people aged 71 to 80 showed that better knowledge on advance care planning dispositions could improve the perception older people have of them. Communication on dispositions should take into account individual knowledge levels and address commonly enunciated barriers that seem to diminish with increased knowl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sign (medicine)
Signs and symptoms are the observed or detectable signs, and experienced symptoms of an illness, injury, or condition. A sign for example may be a higher or lower temperature than normal, raised or lowered blood pressure or an abnormality showing on a medical scan. A symptom is something out of the ordinary that is experienced by an individual such as feeling feverish, a headache or other pain or pains in the body. Signs and symptoms Signs A medical sign is an objective observable indication of a disease, injury, or abnormal physiological state that may be detected during a physical examination, examining the patient history, or diagnostic procedure. These signs are visible or otherwise detectable such as a rash or bruise. Medical signs, along with symptoms, assist in formulating diagnostic hypothesis. Examples of signs include elevated blood pressure, nail clubbing of the fingernails or toenails, staggering gait, and arcus senilis and arcus juvenilis of the eyes. Indication ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reference Class Forecasting
Reference class forecasting or comparison class forecasting is a method of predicting the future by looking at similar past situations and their outcomes. The theories behind reference class forecasting were developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The theoretical work helped Kahneman win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Reference class forecasting is so named as it predicts the outcome of a planned action based on actual outcomes in a reference class of similar actions to that being forecast. Discussion of which reference class to use when forecasting a given situation is known as the reference class problem. Overview Kahneman and Tversky Decision Research Technical Report PTR-1042-77-6. In found that human judgment is generally optimistic due to overconfidence and insufficient consideration of distributional information about outcomes. People tend to underestimate the costs, completion times, and risks of planned actions, whereas they tend to overestimate the benefits of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prediction
A prediction (Latin ''præ-'', "before," and ''dicere'', "to say"), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge. There is no universal agreement about the exact difference from "estimation"; different authors and disciplines ascribe different connotations. Future events are necessarily uncertain, so guaranteed accurate information about the future is impossible. Prediction can be useful to assist in making plans about possible developments. Opinion In a non-statistical sense, the term "prediction" is often used to refer to an informed guess or opinion. A prediction of this kind might be informed by a predicting person's abductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and experience; and may be useful—if the predicting person is a knowledgeable person in the field. The Delphi method is a technique for eliciting such expert-judgement-based predictions in a controlled way. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Placebo (origins Of Technical Term)
A placebo ( ) is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, and other procedures. In general, placebos can affect how patients perceive their condition and encourage the body's chemical processes for relieving pain and a few other symptoms, but have no impact on the disease itself. Improvements that patients experience after being treated with a placebo can also be due to unrelated factors, such as regression to the mean (a statistical effect where an unusually high or low measurement is likely to be followed by a less extreme one). The use of placebos in clinical medicine raises ethical concerns, especially if they are disguised as an active treatment, as this introduces dishonesty into the doctor–patient relationship and bypasses informed consent. While it was once assumed that this deception was necessary for placebos to have any effect, ther ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optimism Bias
Optimism bias (or the optimistic bias) is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. Optimism bias is common and transcends gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age.O’Sullivan, Owen P. (2015)The neural basis of always looking on the bright side.''Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences'', 8(1):11–15. Optimistic biases are even reported in non-human animals such as rats and birds. However, autistic people are less susceptible to optimistic biases. Four factors can cause a person to be optimistically biased: their desired end state, their cognitive mechanisms, the information they have about themselves versus others, and overall mood. The optimistic bias is seen in a number of situations. For example: people believing that they are less at risk of being a crime victim, smokers believing that they are less likely to contract lung can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nocebo
A nocebo effect is said to occur when negative expectations of the patient regarding a treatment cause the treatment to have a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. For example, when a patient anticipates a side effect of a medication, they can experience that effect even if the "medication" is actually an inert substance. The complementary concept, the ''placebo'' effect, is said to occur when positive expectations improve an outcome. The effect is also said to occur in someone who falls ill owing to the erroneous belief that they were exposed to a toxin, or to a physical phenomenon they believe is harmful, such as EM radiation. Both placebo and nocebo effects are presumably wikt:psychogenic, psychogenic, but they can induce measurable changes in the body. One article that reviewed 31 studies on nocebo effects reported a wide range of symptoms that could manifest as nocebo effects, including nausea, stomach pains, itching, bloating, depression, sleep problems, loss o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medical Diagnosis
Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being implicit. The information required for diagnosis is typically collected from a history and physical examination of the person seeking medical care. Often, one or more diagnostic procedures, such as medical tests, are also done during the process. Sometimes posthumous diagnosis is considered a kind of medical diagnosis. Diagnosis is often challenging because many signs and symptoms are nonspecific. For example, redness of the skin (erythema), by itself, is a sign of many disorders and thus does not tell the healthcare professional what is wrong. Thus differential diagnosis, in which several possible explanations are compared and contrasted, must be performed. This involves the correlation of various pieces of information followed by the recognition and differentiat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hippocrates
Hippocrates of Kos (; grc-gre, Ἱπποκράτης ὁ Κῷος, Hippokrátēs ho Kôios; ), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician of the classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referred to as the "Father of Medicine" in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field, such as the use of prognosis and clinical observation, the systematic categorization of diseases, or the formulation of humoral theory. The Hippocratic school of medicine revolutionized ancient Greek medicine, establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields with which it had traditionally been associated (theurgy and philosophy), thus establishing medicine as a profession. However, the achievements of the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, the practitioners of Hippocratic medicine, and the actions of Hippocrates himself were often conflated; thus very little is known about what Hippocrates actually t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Survival Rate
Survival rate is a part of survival analysis. It is the proportion of people in a study or treatment group still alive at a given period of time after diagnosis. It is a method of describing prognosis in certain disease conditions, and can be used for the assessment of standards of therapy. The survival period is usually reckoned from date of diagnosis or start of treatment. Survival rates are based on the population as a whole and cannot be applied directly to an individual. There are various types of survival rates (discussed below). They often serve as endpoints of clinical trials and should not be confused with mortality rates, a population metric. Overall survival Patients with a certain disease (for example, colorectal cancer) can die directly from that disease or from an unrelated cause (for example, a car accident). When the precise cause of death is not specified, this is called the overall survival rate or observed survival rate. Doctors often use mean overall survival ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Progression-free Survival
Progression-free survival (PFS) is "the length of time during and after the treatment of a disease, such as cancer, that a patient lives with the disease but it does not get worse". In oncology, PFS usually refers to situations in which a tumor is present, as demonstrated by laboratory testing, radiologic testing, or clinically. Similarly, "disease-free survival" is the length of time after patients have received treatment and have no detectable disease. Time to progression (TTP) does not count patients who die from other causes but is otherwise a close equivalent to PFS (unless there are many such events). The FDA gives separate definitions and prefers PFS. Background PFS is widely used as a surrogate endpoint in oncology. The definition of "progression" generally involves imaging techniques (plain radiograms, CT scans, MRI, PET scans, ultrasounds) or other aspects: biochemical progression may be defined on the basis of an increase in a tumor marker (such as CA125 for epithelial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
