El caso clínico

Abstract

The clinical case is a frequent way of presenting a paper in a scientific journal and is included in the "information for authors" section of many biomedical publications. It consists of the presentation of an annotated report on a patient's health problem describing his or her illness, its history, diagnosis, therapeutic interventions and evolution¹. Usually, situations are reported that have a peculiar clinical component, because it is a rare disease or because the health team's interventions and therapeutic options are complex or novel. The clinical case may give rise to a detailed review of the pathology described, with emphasis on the most relevant literature on the subject. A variant of this type of publication is the "clinical case series" in which a group of patients with the same diagnosis is presented in order to compare both the characteristics of the disease in question and the therapeutic options chosen². Some journals are specialized in this type of articles and others have introduced a model called "clinical case with error" in which the evolution of the situation presented is analyzed in order to determine what circumstances made the error described possible and to improve the quality of care³.