RT Journal
A1 Chiolero A
T1 THere is nothing personal
JF Archives of Internal Medicine
JO Archives of Internal Medicine
YR 2012
FD November 26
VO 172
IS 21
SP 1691
OP 1692
DO 10.1001/archinternmed.2012.4430
UL http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2012.4430
AB 
Patient's characteristics such as age, sex, lifestyle, socioeconomic status, biomarkers, past environmental exposure, or genetic variants can help identify groups or strata of patients who are more (or less) likely to develop a disease or respond to a treatment.3 Such characteristics can improve our ability to estimate the probability of getting a common disease. Nevertheless, probability is a group property and should not be confounded with individual determinism. At the individual level, either you get or do not get the disease; there is no probability. Suppose there are 2 patients with exactly the same characteristics, including genetic makeup, and these characteristics are predictive of getting a disease. These 2 patients are in the same risk stratum, which is associated with a given—and sometimes quantifiable—likelihood of getting the disease. Still, 1 of these 2 patients could get the disease and not the other, and it is not possible to know a priori which one will be afflicted eventually.