Research studies often report results which in some way quantify the risk of an outcome. In psychiatry such outcomes include the development of a psychiatric disorder following exposure to a risk factor (the focus of epidemiological studies); the experience of a relapse in the period immediately after a patient’s recovery (the focus of long-term outcome or maintenance therapy studies); and a serious event such as violent behaviour or a suicide attempt. Risks of such outcomes are presented in a number of forms, and a recurring difficulty is how to present the numerical value in a way that is most helpful to clinicians, patients and policy makers.
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