How Are Patients Admitted into the Undiagnosed Disease Program?
Patients apply to the program and are accepted based on objective evidence that they have a diagnosable condition. In this video, HealthMaker Cynthia Tifft, MD, PhD, director of NIH’s Pediatric Undiagnosed Diseases Program, explains what’s involved.
Transcript
So patients apply to the program. And we review hundreds and hundreds of pages of medical records on each person.
So this takes hours and hours. Usually, two or more specialists review each case. We look to see whether or not there are objective findings.
In other words, you know, is there something there? Not just something-- someone's saying they feel like this, or this is happening, but there's some objective evidence
that they have something going on. And we typically choose those cases that we think we have a chance of solving.
You know, I like to say to our applicants, every applicant, every patient is desperate. But there are some that we feel like we might be able
to achieve a diagnosis in, maybe because they have a very unusual presentation, or it's-- it's a-- it's a thing in which we have particular expertise.
health screening
Browse videos by topic categories
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
ALL