This was a study on a conditioned probability, since the subjects knew the quality of the clinical response at the time of their guess about treatment. When the analysis was done taking into account the clinical response at the end of 8 weeks, nonresponse was a strong predictor that clinicians, patients, or parents stated that patient was receiving placebo, while response was a strong predictor that clinicians, patients, or parents guessed that the patient was receiving the active compound. The clinicians predicted medication for the responders, ie, 27 out

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of 31 patients and placebo for the nonresponders, ie, 26 out of 35 patients. These predictions were not correct.20 The other studies were on the prognostication of 100 alcoholics21 and on the course of hospitalization of 62 psychiatric patients.22 The very limited Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical number of studies in which the direct prediction of clinicians was measured cannot be explained by methodological problems, since there are studies during which it would have been easy to add an initial evaluation of patients’ Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical future outcome by psychiatrists. Such data would not have been difficult to gather: patient outcome could be expressed

in simple terms, for example, describing improvement on a 7-point scale such as the clinical global impression (CGI) scale. A more complete methodology would be to ask clinicians to list several outcomes for each patient, and associate probabilities to each of these outcomes. We will Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical describe a few studies on the variables influencing outcome to demonstrate how unfortunate it is that the simple issue of the quality of physicians’ bets quality was not included in protocols. Fichter et al23 studied 196 women with bulimia nervosa purging type, 103 women with anorexia nervosa, and 68 Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical women with binge Navitoclax structure eating disorder. They used path analysis with 14 factors

and found many correlations, but only a few of these were statistically significant and related to the outcome of the patients after 6 years. It might have been interesting to compare this multifactorial statistical approach with the performance of clinicians in predicting Dacomitinib evolution. Gabriels et al24studied 17 children with a diagnosis of autism and organized a follow-up evaluation at a mean duration of 40 months of treatment. The outcome was not related to treatment; sellekchem however, pretrcatment developmental intelligence was higher in those with a better outcome. Here also, it would have been easy to explore whether clinicians could have made such a prediction. Pyne ct al25 studied 59 inpatients with major depressive disorder. They measured a series of variables chosen from the literature for prediction of evolution in mood disorders and, depending on the variables included, obtained an accuracy value of 69% to 86%.