Prognosis by Calculation

Abstract

Assessment of prognosis in patients who have serious illness is an important and often difficult problem. Many attributes are customarily monitored, but the results of these measurements are related to survival with adjectives and adverbs rather than with quantitative data. With the recent publication of mathematical expressions for the likelihood that a patient with a myocardial infarction will survive acutely¹ and chronically,² medicine took a large step forward in replacing verbal with quantitative description. The authors of these papers evaluated the contribution of each measurement to the assessment of prognosis, and, focusing on measurements that had an important influence on . . .