Endodontic Prognosis

Prognosis and outcome are two terms routinely used in medicine and dentistry to predict and assess the treatment of disease. Prognosis is a practitioner’s assessment about how a patient will recover from an illness or injury. It is a forecast of the probable course of recovery for any particular disease considering the assessment of the case. Outcome is the end result of the treatment and a consequence of treatment decisions made by the practitioner. In endodontics, there are prognostic factors which are universal to all cases as well as variables unique to a specific case, all of which can affect endodontic treatment outcomes. Prognostic factors can be grouped into preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative. They influence endodontic treatment outcomes indirectly through control and elimination of infection. Importantly, an understanding of prognostic factors helps practitioners as well as patients decide the appropriate treatment procedures and is especially important for higher-risk conditions such as teeth with a periapical N. Chugal (*) Section of Endodontics, UCLA School of Dentistry, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] L.M. Lin Department of Endodontics, New York University College of Dentistry, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Kahler School of Dentistry, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] 1 Many authors display a propensity to reduce complex problems such as success and failure to terms so simple that a casual reader with little effort can expand a narrow grasp of the subject into a broad convenient misunderstanding Dudley Glick, DDS Excerpt from a lecture Year unknown