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I had an English exam today. One of the questions was fill in the gaps. It was like:

Doctors diagnosed him with/ for hyperactivity.

So should the gap be with or for? I checked Google and there are a lot of examples of each.

Kris
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showbiz
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    Many dictionaries will tell you immediately that the correct preposition is ‘with’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 01 '13 at 11:41
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    yes - and you should only trust a google source if it is adequately referenced. – user49727 Sep 01 '13 at 12:32
  • Both are correct in their appropriate contexts. See usage examples to understand the difference. "Minorities, young people take longer to diagnose for cancer, ...;" "Texas Chiropractors Seek Ability to Diagnose for Spine, Muscle System;" "Being able to test and diagnose for diabetes is quite challenging and very difficult for most doctors because the human blood sugar level is not ..." Get it? – Kris Sep 02 '13 at 06:55
  • Why close the question? – Kris Sep 02 '13 at 06:58
  • Since I am a physician of over 30 years' experience, I think my expertise counts for something. Barrie is correct. The comments from Janus and Peter are generally also correct. "Diagnose for (a disease)" is simply not correct, not even in the manner suggested, as if diagnose was somehow synonymous with test. It is not. Nor is the usage changing. Medical jargon is specific, as it must be. Diagnose means to definitively identify a disease, period. You may diagnose a disease (no preposition), or diagnose a patient as having or with a disease. That's it, and that's all. – John M. Landsberg Sep 03 '13 at 06:45
  • @JohnM.Landsberg Makes perfect sense, agrees with your definition, which is what the dictionaries too generally provide: "... there is provided a system for analysis of liquid or semi-solid body secretion samples obtained from human patients to diagnose for the presence or absence of abnormalities in the patient, ..." Alcohol Oxidoreductases—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 p.65 -- [emphasis mine] Notice the significance of the preposition here. – Kris Sep 04 '13 at 10:45
  • http://books.google.co.in/books?id=w77cZvUTuugC&lpg=PA65&dq=%22diagnose%20for%22&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=%22diagnose%20for%22&f=false – Kris Sep 04 '13 at 10:46

2 Answers2

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Diagnosed with is by far the most frequent and it is what I, as a speaker of British English, would use. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 3,215 records for diagnosed with and 20 for diagnosed for. I haven’t looked at the contexts in which diagnosed for is used, but they clearly must be quite exceptional.

Barrie England
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  • In a regular Google search (and I would imagine also in Google Books), most of those hits are in cases like, “She was diagnosed for the first time”, “She had been mis-diagnosed for four years”, etc., where ‘for’ belongs to a separate phrase. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 01 '13 at 11:52
  • It’s much the same in the COCA, but it does include these: ‘At the time I got diagnosed for it I didn' it think of this as stress’, ‘Andrea had been diagnosed for depression and hospitalized’, ‘be diagnosed for exactly the form of hypertension that you have’, ‘when I've been diagnosed for cancer’, ‘All patients in the study had been diagnosed for diabetes’. – Barrie England Sep 01 '13 at 11:56
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    There were some of those in Google General, too. To me, those are quite unambiguously ungrammatical, but they appear to come from native speakers, so obviously it must be grammatical to some speakers, somewhere. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 01 '13 at 12:02
  • I too find diagnosed for** to be ungrammatical. I wonder where those examples are coming from. Strange. – tchrist Sep 01 '13 at 14:01
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    I think some people use "diagnosed for" when maybe they really should be using "tested for" ... that is, if you go in for a diagnosis to see whether or not you have cancer, you are being "diagnosed for cancer". If it turns out that you actually do have cancer, you will then have been "diagnosed with cancer". (This could account for some of Barrie's examples, but not all of them ... I think one or two of them are just wrong.) – Peter Shor Sep 01 '13 at 15:23
  • In fact, googling immediately reveals some uses of "diagnosed for" which do have this meaning: for example, "Where do I go to get diagnosed for Asperger syndrome?" and "How to Get Diagnosed for Adult ADHD" are two hits on the first page Google gives for "diagnosed for". – Peter Shor Sep 01 '13 at 15:32
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    @PeterShor – Aha! That explains it. That is an odd usage that I can’t say I’ve ever come across before—all those questions asking about how or where to be diagnosed for something just struck me as utterly bewildering before, but your explanation makes them clear as day. A verbally strange day, but a day nonetheless. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 01 '13 at 21:26
  • I would venture further that "diagnosed for", as a synonym for "tested for", is working its way into the language. – Pieter Geerkens Sep 01 '13 at 22:02
  • Both prepositions are Okay. First the doctors diagnose for something; if the test is confirmed, you say the patient was diagnosed with the something. – Kris Sep 02 '13 at 06:56
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Given your example, Diagnosed with is the correct option.

By the time he was diagnosed with cancer, it was already too late.

Diagnosed of is not used, as far as I understand.However a common usage would be Diagnosis of

Diagnosis of his cancer happened very late.

It may be also used as a headline or header.

Symptoms and Diagnosis of Cancer

Another very common usage is Diagnosed as

He was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

He was diagnosed as suffering from cancer.

Community
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Gurpreet K Sekhon
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  • You may wish to edit & clarify your answer. Your first sentence doesn't make sense. "... Diagnosed of and Diagnosed with is the correct option". You then later contradict it by saying "Diagnosed of is not used". – TrevorD Sep 02 '13 at 12:53
  • Corrected, hope it works. – Gurpreet K Sekhon Sep 03 '13 at 08:56