The use and misuse of risk prediction tools for clinical decision-making

Risk prediction tools are of great value in supporting clinical decision-making: they can identify, for example, the potential benefit of a treatment on prognosis of an individual patient, the risk of (late) health complaints, or the risk of further spread of a disease. These individual estimates can consequently be used to weigh the benefits of a certain treatment against its harms, which is crucial in the current era of personalised medicine. Additionally, more and more diseases are known to be very heterogeneous which is reflected in the necessity for prediction tools to incorporate the multifactorial influence of a wide range of different patient- and disease-related variables to provide accurate estimates.