Medical Students' and Residents' Estimates of Cardiac Risk

Thomas G. Tape and Robert S. Wigton

Medical Decision Making, 1989, vol. 9, issue 3, 170-175

Abstract: Resident physicians' and medical students' perceptions of atherosclerotic heart disease (ASHD) risks and their understanding of risk appraisal concepts were studied. Subjects estimated the average risks of death from ASHD, from motor vehicle accidents, and from all causes for men in three age groups. Given a patient with severe hypertension, they then estimated relative risk and used their estimates to calculate individual patient risks. Risk estimates varied widely. Only 36% of the subjects were consistently accurate estimators of ASHD and all-causes risks. Subjects who had family histories of heart disease performed significantly better than others. Only about half the subjects were able to compute the hypertensive patient's risk correctly. Thus, residents and students were not adept at esti mating the average risks of death from various causes or using the estimates to assess a patient's risk. Better physician understanding of these concepts might lead to improved patient counseling in risk factor reduction.

Keywords: Key words: risk; risk assessment; cardiovascular dis eases; medical education. (Med Decis Making 1989; 9:170-175) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1989
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X8900900304 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:9:y:1989:i:3:p:170-175

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X8900900304

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().