Advancing diagnostic certainty in Alzheimer’s disease: a synthesis of the diagnostic process

Changes in diagnostic certainty can be evaluated by assessing the impact of a diagnostic test in driving decision making. Diagnostic tests can be appraised using validated measures of accuracy, i.e.; sensitivity, specificity and positive or negative predictive values against a known reference standard. However, other less well formalised factors affect diagnostic certainty. These inputs are under-researched and more difficult to quantify. Clinicians assess the significance of available data in the context of their expertise, pre-diagnostic confidence, and background knowledge of populations and disease. Inherent qualities of the diagnostic test and an individual clinician’s interpretation of the meaning of test results will also affect the subsequent level of diagnostic certainty. These factors are only infrequently considered alongside the diagnostic accuracy of a test. In this paper, we present a model of the different processes which can affect diagnostic certainty in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This model builds upon existing understanding and provides further insights into the complexity of diagnostic certainty in AD and how we might improve this.