Impact of positron emission tomography on clinical decision making.

treatment to the patient’s specific clinical situation. We also made a separate recommendation to consider patients with idiopathic venous thromboembolism for indefinite anticoagulant treatment (grade 2A).6 Finally, we also included an explicit statement of the values and preferences underlying our recommendation, namely, “This recommendation ascribes a relatively high value to preventing recurrent thromboembolic events and a relatively low value on bleeding and cost.”6 Therefore, by including this explicit statement, we acknowledged that our recommendation was weighted toward preventing recurrent thromboembolism, and that clinicians may select a shorter duration of treatment, such as 3 months, for those patients who place a relatively higher value on avoiding bleeding than on preventing recurrent thromboembolism.