Abstract
The prognosis of the patient with rheumatic valvular disease was estimated by the statistical method called quantification using a digital computer.
This method gives a patient the scores which are summations of the weight of each category (clinical finding), and estimates the prognosis by the distribution of the scores.Each part of different prognoses has already been difined by the scores of patients whose prognoses were known, and these weights have been calculated with the clinical data thereof. As these weights are values in which the variance of the scores between groups of prognoses becomes maximum, estimations of other cases seem to come true in most probability.
The clinical findings of 101 cases were used for the calculation of weights. As these cases were observed during medication for an average of 5 years in our hospital, their prognoses were known. 10 clinical findings were selected on the basis of chest X-ray, electrocardiogram, phonocardiogram, cardiac catheterization, age, treatment, and symptoms. The scores of these patients were distributed in three parts of two dimensions.The fatal cases were found mostly in the third quadrant, the aggravated cases, in the first, and the unchanged cases, in the fourth. The estimations of the prognoses of 13 other patients with rheumatic valvular disease showed good agreement with actual conditions after 5 years in 11 cases (85 %).
This method applies easily to clinical data and seems to be a useful means by which prognosis can be estimated objectively, simply and as a whole picture of a patient.
