The importance of more objective diagnostic methods in diagnosing suspected cases of heart failure should be emphasised.
Defining cellular and molecular criteria associated with each disorder will help to uncover causal physiological changes in patients and will lead to more objective diagnostic criteria.
Another potential weakness of our study is that we relied on physicians' diagnoses of somatisation rather using more objective diagnostic criteria.
Therefore several other more objective diagnostic tools (e.g. neuroimaging, neurophysiological methods or psychomotor tests), were implemented to diagnose both minimal and overt HE, but there is still an ongoing debate which of them should be a diagnostic standard [ 23- 25].
This higher sensitivity of the PACS for 2/3 of the symptoms may be a consequence of the more objective diagnostic conceptualization of the PACS, which assesses symptoms to a lesser extent by an implicit deviance rating, as the questionnaire does, but rather by asking how frequent and how intensive a symptom occurs.
Quantitative trait association studies offer several advantages over case-control studies, since the dependent measures are quantitative and more objective than diagnostic categorization, and can increase the statistical power four to eight fold, thus greatly decreasing the required sample size to achieve sufficient statistical power [4].
Limitations include the lack of other race/ethnic groups and lack of more objective RP diagnostic testing, such as Laser Doppler flowmetry, digital plethysmography, laser Doppler perfusion imaging, or cold simulation tests.
Clearly, more objective, molecular methods for diagnostic discrimination among gliomas are needed.
The lexicon not only simplified the communication of the radiologists' level of suspicion but also allowed more objective quantification of the diagnostic performance of MRI for diagnosing ECE, with a reported area under the curve of 0.85 [ 8].
Their results suggested that anti-α-fodrin antibodies might replace anti-Ro and anti-La antibodies, as a more objective serological marker to improve the diagnostic value of classification criteria.
