In ancient Greece, the asclepion was a healing temple dedicated to Asclepius, the God of Medicine. Asclepius learned the art of surgery from the centaur Chiron and had the ability to raise the dead. The Rod of Asclepius is a roughhewn branch entwined with a single serpent.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Checking All the Boxes
I'm not 100% sure this is an accurate statement, but here's a thought. When we order labs, it's easy to check all the boxes: CBC, chem-7, electrolytes, LFTs, pregnancy test, etc. But here's the problem: if you take a normal person and order 1 test, you have a 5% false positive rate (if the tests are calibrated to p=0.05). If you order 5 tests, you have a 23% likelihood of one false positive. 20 tests, and you're up to 64% likelihood of a false positive. If you order 100 tests on a normal person, you're almost guaranteed to have at least one false positive (99.4%). This is based on tests having 95% sensitivity which isn't horrible (though I admit many tests have better sensitivities than that). This is the reason why I think data mining microarrays is a statistically ridiculous idea.
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