Case reports are professional narratives that provide feedback on clinical practice guidelines and offer a framework for early signals of effectiveness, adverse events, and cost.
Case reports and series have a high sensitivity for detecting novelty and therefore remain one of the cornerstones of medical progress; they provide many new ideas in medicine.
[7] Whereas randomized clinical trials usually only inspect one variable or very few variables, rarely reflecting the full picture of a complicated medical situation, the case report can detail many different aspects of the patient's medical situation (e.g. patient history, physical examination, diagnosis, psychosocial aspects, follow up).
[4] A particular attraction of case reports is the possibility of quick publication (with respect to more extensive studies such as randomized control trials), allowing them to act as a kind of rapid short communication between busy clinicians who may not have the time or resources to conduct large scale research.
[4] In response to these issues, reporting guidelines are under development to facilitate greater transparency and completeness in the provision of relevant information for individual cases.
[4] An explanation and elaboration article (a manual for writing case reports following the CARE guidelines) was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2017.