CARE (CAse REport) Guidelines: A Recipe for More Transparent Case Reports

Abstract

Case reports are the types of medical writing that are often described as the scientific documentation of a single clinical observation (1). The first examples of case reports probably date back to the BC era (2). Since then, case reports found themselves a permanent position in the medical literature for the purposes of informing about the findings of new diseases and modes of medical interventions, describing the adverse or beneficial outcomes of a procedure, and have also been used for teaching purposes (3). There are seminal examples of case reports in the medical literature that have antecedently addressed the beneficial or adverse effects of treatment protocols in specific clinical entities such as the relationship between phocomelia and thalidomide, or propranolol treatment for infantile hemangioma (4, 5). Despite, however, the numerous contributions of case reports to the medical literature, controversies have emerged among the scientific community regarding their varying quality and level of evidence, especially in the last 20 years (6).