Diagnosable

Diagnosable is an adjective describing something that can be diagnosed. In clinical contexts, a condition is diagnosable if it can be identified and classified using established criteria, clinical assessment, and diagnostic tests. The term emphasizes the possibility of a diagnosis rather than asserting its certainty.

In medicine, diagnosability often hinges on standardized diagnostic criteria and reliable testing. Some conditions have clear, objective criteria and tests, while others rely on symptom patterns, history, and expert judgment. Diagnostic challenges include overlapping symptoms, atypical presentations, subthreshold features, and variable disease expression. Being diagnosable does not guarantee a correct or timely diagnosis, and misdiagnosis remains a risk when information is incomplete or tests are inconclusive.

Beyond medicine, diagnosable can describe systems, faults, or phenomena that yield identifiable causes or diagnostic information when examined with appropriate tools. For example, a diagnosable software fault is one whose root cause can be determined through debugging, logging, or diagnostic reports.

Etymology: the word is formed from diagnose plus the suffix -able, with roots in the Greek and Latin languages related to knowledge and judging. See also diagnostic criteria, differential diagnosis, diagnostic test, and diagnosis.