[thebelal]

One of the cancers they mention is pancreatic cancer.

A quick Google search suggests the prevalence of pancreatic cancer in the population is 13 per 100,000.

So if you gave this test with a 0.005 false positive rate and 0.5 true positive rate to 100,000 people it would miss diagnose 500 people and only correctly detect 7 cancers.

So given you had a positive test result there would be a 1-(7/500)=98.6% chance you did _not_ have pancreatic cancer.

Doesn't seem very useful in that light...

[konschubert]

The false positive rate of 0.5% refers to the chance that there is ANY false positive in the whole screening, not just a false positive on the pancreatic cancer segment.

[kieranmaine]

Does this take into account age?

The article says:

"The test, which is also being piloted by NHS England in the autumn, is aimed at people at higher risk of the disease including patients aged 50 or older"

[whiterock]

The test is aimed at people over 50 were, sadly, the prevalence is much higher!

[kieranmaine]

It seems like there are a number of other risk factors as well (see https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...), that could shrink the pool of people tested.