Prognosis is the prediction or the act of making an informed guess, forecast or prediction of a disease course, following the disease’s onset. It may refer to a disease’s possible outcomes and the frequency or probability that the disease may occur or re-occur or it can be said to be the prediction that a patient will survive a certain health condition. There are various approaches to expressing prognosis. This paper however intends to discuss one among the various approaches to expressing prognosis which is the case-fatality rate approach (Gordis, 2013).
Also known as case fatality risk, case fatality ratio, or simply fatality rate, this approach seeks to ascertain the proportions of mortality within a certain set population of cases, who are the people with a certain health or medical condition, over the course of the disease. Generally, case fatality rate is used to measure not necessarily the risk or rate but the severity of a disease in which the prognosis is comparative indicate high rates of relatively poor outcomes. It is also used in evaluating the effects of new remedies or treatments with decreasing measures as treatments increase (Gordis, 2013).
Case fatality is achieved by dividing the number of deaths from a certain disease over a designated time period by the number of people diagnosed with that disease in the span of the specified time, then multiplying the result by hundred. Fatality rate as a true rate estimates the risk of succumbing to death from a certain disease. For instance if in a population of 1000 people, 400 of them have a specified disease and 100 of them die from the disease, then the fatality rate is 100/400=0.25 which transforms to 25 percent. In a second population of 1000 people, 300 suffering the specified disease and 50 die out of the disease, the fatality rate is 50/300=0.167 transforming to 16.67 percent. This means that the severity of the disease is higher in the first population (Gordis, 2013).
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