I really like to teach the foreground/background questions to address
students to a meanigful reading of the scientific literature (and, of
course, to a meanigful practice :-)
I found -probably like many others- that teaching the 4-components
foreground question as the "PICO" question" makes a lot easier for the
students to grasp it.
However, the PICO acronym (patient, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome)
does not seem to work well for clinical questions on diagnosis or prognosis.
As far as I understand, here the 4 components of the clinical question
would be:
P- Patient
I- Positive test
C- Negative test
O- Post-test probability of diagnosis
Although the "C" for "comparison" may describe well a negative test, and
the diagnosis can be easily seen as an "outcome", the "I" for
"intervention" does not represent well a positive result.
Does anybody have a better meaning for the "I" (I tend to tell it as
"Ipotesi", which is Italian for Hypothesis, but of course this is just a
trick) or a different acronym more consistent with diagnostic test?
thanks,
Piersante Sestini
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