Prognosis

71 Expert Conversations

71 Expert Conversations

This collection focuses on the questions patients and parents ask about the future course of a disease: childhood arthritis, multiple myeloma, fatty liver disease, and breast cancer among them, answered directly by the academic specialists who treat these diseases.

The questions patients bring up most often are: What can realistically be expected over months and years with this particular diagnosis? Will a child outgrow this disease, or is it likely to continue into adulthood? Can a disease such as fatty liver disease actually be reversed, or can it only be slowed down? Which questions do patients typically forget to ask their own physician, that they should be asking?

Long-term outlook is one of the areas where specialists most often see the same case differently, because it depends on subtle features of each patient's disease, history, and response to earlier treatment. An independent, multi-expert review can bring several academic opinions to bear on a specific prognosis question rather than relying on one physician's estimate alone, and can point out where the evidence itself is genuinely uncertain.

For an independent opinion on a prognosis question, see the medical second opinion page.

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