differential diagnosis

Examples of differential diagnosis in the following topics:

• Disease Diagnosis

  • Medical diagnosis or the actual process of making a diagnosis is a cognitive process.
  • A diagnostic test is any kind of medical test performed to aid in the diagnosis or detection of disease.
  • The method of differential diagnosis is based on finding as many candidate diseases or conditions as possible that could possibly cause the signs or symptoms, followed by a process of elimination or at least of rendering the entries more or less probable by further medical tests and other processing until, to reach the point where only one candidate disease or condition remains as probable.
  • When making a medical diagnosis, a lag time is a delay in time until a step towards diagnosis of a disease or condition is made.
  • Types of lag times are mainly onset-to-medical encounter lag time or the time from onset of symptoms until visiting a health care provider and encounter-to-diagnosis lag time or the time from first medical encounter to diagnosis.

• Fibromyalgia

  • There is no single test that can fully diagnose fibromyalgia, and as such, fibromyalgia is typically a diagnosis of exclusion.
  • In general, most doctors diagnose patients with a process called differential diagnosis, which means that doctors consider all of the possible things that might be wrong with the patient based on the patient's symptoms, gender, age, geographic location, medical history, and other factors.
  • They then narrow down the diagnosis by eliminating the possible disorders one by one until only fibromyalgia is left.

• Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

  • It is a classical item in differential diagnosis, because its symptoms vary widely and come and go unpredictably.
  • Diagnosis can thus be elusive, with some people suffering unexplained symptoms of untreated SLE for years.

• Syncope

  • Thus, the clinical history is the foremost tool used in the differential diagnosis of syncope.

• Assessing CNS Disorders

  • The interval of a complaint can help aid the diagnosis.
  • A differential diagnosis may then be constructed that takes into account the patient's background and presents findings to include the most likely causes.

• Galactosemia and Glycogen Storage Disease

  • Even with an early diagnosis and a restricted diet, however, some individuals with galactosemia experience long-term complications such as speech difficulties, learning disabilities, neurological impairment (e.g. tremors, etc. ), and ovarian failure in females.

• Paget's Disease

  • Because early diagnosis and treatment is important, after age 40, siblings and children of someone with Paget's disease may wish to have an alkaline phosphatase blood test every two or three years.

• Jaundice

  • No single test can differentiate between various classifications of jaundice.
  • A combination of liver function tests is essential to arrive at a diagnosis.

• Leukemia

  • Certain mutations can trigger leukemia by activating oncogenes or deactivating tumor suppressor genes, thereby disrupting the regulation of cell death, differentiation or division.
  • Diagnosis is usually based on repeated complete blood counts and a bone marrow examination following observation of the symptoms.
  • Following diagnosis, blood chemistry tests can be used to determine the degree of liver and kidney damage or the effects of chemotherapy on the patient.

• Pancreatic Cancer

  • The definitive diagnosis is made by an endoscopic needle biopsy or surgical excision of the suspicious tissue.
  • Although only localized cancer is considered suitable for surgery with curative intent at present, only around 20 percent of cases present with localized disease at diagnosis.
  • This micrograph shows the poorly differentiated glandular structures characteristic of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common type of pancreatic cancer.