Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing

While sensitivity and specificity are important characteristics for any diagnostic test, the influence of prevalence is equally, if not more, important when such tests are used in community screening. We review the concepts of positive/negative predictive values (PPV/NPV) and how disease prevalence...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Lau, Chin-Shern, Aw, Tar-Choon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Commentary
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8698426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34940002
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/antib10040050
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author Lau, Chin-Shern
Aw, Tar-Choon
author_facet Lau, Chin-Shern
Aw, Tar-Choon
author_sort Lau, Chin-Shern
collection PubMed
description While sensitivity and specificity are important characteristics for any diagnostic test, the influence of prevalence is equally, if not more, important when such tests are used in community screening. We review the concepts of positive/negative predictive values (PPV/NPV) and how disease prevalence affects false positive/negative rates. In low-prevalence situations, the PPV decreases drastically. We demonstrate how using two tests in an orthogonal fashion can be especially beneficial in low-prevalence settings and greatly improve the PPV of the diagnostic test results.
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spelling pubmed-86984262021-12-24 Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing Lau, Chin-Shern Aw, Tar-Choon Antibodies (Basel) Commentary While sensitivity and specificity are important characteristics for any diagnostic test, the influence of prevalence is equally, if not more, important when such tests are used in community screening. We review the concepts of positive/negative predictive values (PPV/NPV) and how disease prevalence affects false positive/negative rates. In low-prevalence situations, the PPV decreases drastically. We demonstrate how using two tests in an orthogonal fashion can be especially beneficial in low-prevalence settings and greatly improve the PPV of the diagnostic test results. MDPI 2021-12-17 /pmc/articles/PMC8698426/ /pubmed/34940002 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/antib10040050 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Commentary
Lau, Chin-Shern
Aw, Tar-Choon
Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing
title Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing
title_full Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing
title_fullStr Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing
title_full_unstemmed Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing
title_short Disease Prevalence Matters: Challenge for SARS-CoV-2 Testing
title_sort disease prevalence matters: challenge for sars-cov-2 testing
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8698426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34940002
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/antib10040050
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