ArticleEuropean journal of epidemiology2020
When will individuals meet their personalized probabilities? A philosophical note on risk prediction.
Article in European journal of epidemiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Comprehensive comparison of stroke risk score performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis among 6 267 728 patients with atrial fibrillation.Europace : European pacing, arrhythmias, and cardiac electrophysiology : journal of the working groups on cardiac pacing, arrhythmias, and cardiac cellular electrophysiology of the European Society of Cardiology · 2022Pooled it
- If things were simple, word would have gotten around. Can complexity science help us improve pediatric research?Pediatric research · 2025Review
- Assessing the properties of patient-specific treatment effect estimates from causal forest algorithms under essential heterogeneity.BMC medical research methodology · 2024Article
- Prediction or causality? A scoping review of their conflation within current observational research.European journal of epidemiology · 2021Article
- Turtles all the way down: do biological mechanisms for epidemiological observations always matter?European journal of epidemiology · 2021Article
- Epidemiology is about disease in populations.European journal of epidemiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Risk prediction is one of the central goals of medicine. However, ultimate prediction-perfectly predicting whether individuals will actually get a disease-is still out of reach for virtually all conditions. One crucial assumption of ultimate personalized prediction is that individual risks in the relevant sense exist. In the present paper we argue that perfect prediction at the individual level will fail-and we will do so by providing pragmatic, epistemic, conceptual, and ontological arguments.
Indexed as
Identifiers
33247797What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.