CARE Case Report Guidelines

The CARE (CAse REport) Guidelines are a reporting standard for clinical case reports and small case-report series, developed to improve the completeness, transparency, and reusability of a published case so that its clinical lesson can be extracted and evaluated by other clinicians and by systematic reviewers. CARE was developed in 2013 by an international consensus group — Joel Gagnier, Gunver Kienle, Douglas Altman, David Moher, Harold Sox, David Riley, and the CARE Group — and the guideline was published simultaneously in seven medical journals. CARE is indexed by the EQUATOR Network, the umbrella library of health-research reporting guidelines, alongside CONSORT for randomised trials and STROBE for observational studies.

What CARE requires

The CARE checklist sets out 13 items an author should address when writing up a single patient case or a small case series: title, keywords, abstract, introduction, patient information, clinical findings, timeline, diagnostic assessment, therapeutic intervention, follow-up and outcomes, discussion, patient perspective, and informed consent. A companion explanation-and-elaboration document annotates each item with worked examples of adequate reporting, and an interactive authoring tool, CARE-writer, is available on the CARE Statement website to walk authors through the checklist item by item.

Why it exists

Case reports are frequently the first published signal of a novel adverse drug reaction, an unusual disease presentation, or a diagnostic or therapeutic innovation. Before CARE, case reports were written up inconsistently — often omitting a clear timeline, the diagnostic reasoning behind a workup, or complete outcome data — which made it difficult for clinicians and reviewers to judge or reuse them. CARE gives journals, editors, and peer reviewers a shared checklist against which to require and screen case report submissions, in the same way CONSORT standardised trial reporting and STROBE standardised observational-study reporting.

Where CARE does not apply

A multi-patient cohort, case-control, or cross-sectional study should follow STROBE rather than CARE, and a randomised controlled trial should follow CONSORT. CARE is scoped specifically to the single-patient or small-case-series report, not to a comparative or interventional study design — choosing the wrong checklist for the study design is one of the more common reporting-guideline errors editors flag at submission.

References

• Gagnier JJ, Kienle G, Altman DG, Moher D, Sox H, Riley D; CARE Group. ‘The CARE guidelines: consensus-based clinical case report guideline development,’ published simultaneously across seven journals, 2013.
• EQUATOR Network, CARE reporting guideline page.
• CARE Statement — official checklist, explanation and elaboration document, and CARE-writer authoring tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I find the official CARE checklist?

The official CARE checklist, together with an explanation-and-elaboration document and the CARE-writer authoring tool, is published on the CARE Statement website. CARE is also indexed by the EQUATOR Network, the umbrella library of health-research reporting guidelines.

How many items are on the CARE checklist, and what do they cover?

The CARE checklist sets out 13 items: title, keywords, abstract, introduction, patient information, clinical findings, timeline, diagnostic assessment, therapeutic intervention, follow-up and outcomes, discussion, patient perspective, and informed consent.

When was the CARE guideline developed?

CARE was developed in 2013 by an international consensus group — Joel Gagnier, Gunver Kienle, Douglas Altman, David Moher, Harold Sox, David Riley, and the CARE Group — and the guideline was published simultaneously in seven medical journals.

Does the CARE checklist require documenting informed consent?

Yes. Informed consent is one of the 13 items on the CARE checklist, alongside patient information, timeline, diagnostic assessment, therapeutic intervention, and follow-up and outcomes.

Does CARE apply to every case report, or only single-patient reports?

CARE is scoped to the single-patient case report or a small case-report series. A multi-patient cohort, case-control, or cross-sectional study should follow STROBE instead, and a randomised controlled trial should follow CONSORT.

Related CASRAI content

For applying CARE to the abstract specifically — section-by-section structure, word limits, a worked example, and case-report versus case-series abstracts — see How to Write a Case Report Abstract.