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VII. How to Use a Clinical Decision Analysis B. What Are the Results and Will They Help Me in Caring for My Patients?

W. Scott Richardson, MD; Allan S. Detsky, MD, PhD; the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group; Gordon Guyatt, MD, MSc; Deborah Cook, MD, MSc; Hertzel Gerstein, MD, MSc; Robert Hayward, MD, MPH; Anne Holbrook, MD, PharmD; Roman Jaeschke, MD, MSc; Elizabeth Juniper, MCSP, MSc; Mitchell Levine, MD, MSc; David Naylor, MD, DPhil; Andrew Oxman, MD, MSc; David Sackett, MD, MSc; Sean Tunis, MD, MSc; Stephen Walter, PhD; John Williams, Jr, MD, MHS; Mark Wilson, MD, MPH

JAMA. 1995;273(20):1610-1613.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

YOU RECALL from the first of our two articles concerning clinical decision analysis¹ that your patient is a middle-aged man with heart failure from an idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. You are trying to decide whether to recommend anticoagulation with warfarin to prevent systemic or pulmonary thromboembolism. Your literature search showed that no randomized clinical trials of warfarin for this use have been published. The search did discover a clinical decision analysis,² and in the first article, we showed you how to evaluate its validity. In this article, we will show you how to interpret the results and generalizability of a clinical decision analysis (Table).

As shown in the Figure, decision trees are displayed graphically, oriented from left to right, with the decision to be analyzed on the left, the compared strategies in the center, and the clinical outcomes on the right. The square box, termed a "decision node," represents . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Department of Medicine, University of Rochester (NY) School of Medicine and Dentistry (Dr Richardson), and the Departments of Health Administration and Medicine, University of Toronto (Ontario), and the Division of General Internal Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology, The Toronto (Ontario) Hospital (Dr Detsky).

Footnotes
A complete list of members (with affiliations) of the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group appears in the first article of this series (JAMA. 1993;270:2093-2095). The following members contributed to this article: Gordon Guyatt, MD, MSc (chair); Deborah Cook, MD, MSc; Hertzel Gerstein, MD, MSc; Robert Hayward, MD, MPH; Anne Holbrook, MD, PharmD; Roman Jaeschke, MD, MSc; Elizabeth Juniper, MCSP, MSc; Mitchell Levine, MD, MSc; David Naylor, MD, DPhil; Andrew Oxman, MD, MSc; David Sackett, MD, MSc; Sean Tunis, MD, MSc; Stephen Walter, PhD; John Williams, Jr, MD, MHS; and Mark Wilson, MD, MPH.

Reprint requests to Room 2C12, McMaster University Health Sciences Centre, 1200 Main St W, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8N 3Z5 (Gordon Guyatt, MD, MSc).

Users' Guides to the Medical Literature section editor: Drummond Rennie, MD, Deputy Editor (West), JAMA.

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