Rapporto rischi-benefici in Neuro-oncologia: Spunti per migliorare il decision-making

The concept of Risk Management was introduced in the USA during the 80s in order to increase safety of patients and decrease social costs for malpractice, so that many risk management programs were promoted. Learning, preventing and handling clinical risk is nowadays a topical matter. In our paper, after getting into the safety-risk dialectics we stress the need to search for the connection between cause and adverse event. Clinical risk indicators are then proposed to accomplish advanced decision-making programs. Accurate clinical risk outlining is instrumental in defining the risk-benefit ratio inherent to therapeutic procedures; this process is more difficult in areas where class I evidence is limited, such as neuroncology. Specific adaptation of risk management programs to clinical risk in neuroncology is outlined.