Re: Subject 11q VH Mutated or VH UnMutated?

[Guest guest]

I think this is a good opportunity to echo my mantra

regarding prognostics. Prognostic factors are only

effective at predicting how a population of patients will

fare, not how an individual will do.

As Sir Aurthur Conon Doyle stated: " While the individual man

is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a

mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never

foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say

with precision what a number will be up to. So says the

statistician "

There is no means to tell where on the curve someone will

be. There will be people on the poor prognostic curve who

will do better than some on the good prognostic curve.

There is no better predictor than following the course of

the disease.

Regarding this case in particular, VH1-69 is almost always

associated with unmutated IgVH, so I wonder if the test is

either off, or just one of the variables that fall outside

of the range.

It is also important to note that their likely exists a

hierarchy regarding the impact of prognostic markers. We

have figured some of them out, but there are too many

variables to look at them all.

Rick Furman, MD

wrote:

/message/16009