Abstract
Risk prediction is one of the central goals of medicine. However, ultimate prediction–perfectly predicting whether individuals will actually get a disease–is still out of reach for virtually all conditions. One crucial assumption of ultimate personalized prediction is that individual risks in the relevant sense exist. In the present paper we argue that perfect prediction at the individual level will fail–and we will do so by providing pragmatic, epistemic, conceptual, and ontological arguments.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Ewout Steyerberg, George Davey-Smith, Doranne Thomassen and Jan Vandenbroucke for constructive comments on a prefinal version of the manuscript.
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JM was funded by NWO (VENI) Grant number 275–20-068.
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Dekkers, O.M., Mulder, J.M. When will individuals meet their personalized probabilities? A philosophical note on risk prediction. Eur J Epidemiol 35, 1115–1121 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-020-00700-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-020-00700-w