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"Differential diagnosis" is also used more loosely to refer simply to a list of the most common causes of a given symptom, to a list of disorders similar to a given disorder, or to such lists when they are annotated with advice on how to narrow the list down (French's Index of Differential Diagnosis is an example). Thus, a differential ...
Importantly, individuals can also differ not only in their current state, but in the magnitude or even direction of response to a given stimulus. [5] Such phenomena, often explained in terms of inverted-U response curves, place differential psychology at an important location in such endeavours as personalized medicine, in which diagnoses are customised for an individual's response profile.
Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatment plans, assist with differential diagnosis, help answer legal questions (forensic psychology), screen job candidates during the personnel selection process, or as part of a therapeutic assessment procedure. [3]
Example of differential diagnosis Over the last two centuries, western mental health science has focused on nosology whereby panels of experts identify hypothetical sets of signs and symptoms , label, and compile them into taxonomies such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders .
For example, a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, a common mental illness, had a poor reliability kappa statistic of 0.28, indicating that clinicians frequently disagreed on diagnosing this disorder in the same patients. The most reliable diagnosis was major neurocognitive disorder, with a kappa of 0.78. [103]
Such elimination of other reasonable possibilities is a major component in performing a differential diagnosis. [1] Diagnosis by exclusion tends to occur where scientific knowledge is scarce, specifically where the means to verify a diagnosis by an objective method is absent.
The method of differential diagnosis is based on finding as many candidate diseases or conditions as possible that can 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, aiming to reach the point where only one ...
Dimensional models are intended to reflect what constitutes personality disorder symptomology according to a spectrum, rather than in a dichotomous way.As a result of this they have been used in three key ways; firstly to try to generate more accurate clinical diagnoses, secondly to develop more effective treatments and thirdly to determine the underlying etiology of disorders.