[jrockway]

Specificity and sensitivity are two dimensions that you can measure tests in. You can claim your test is 99% accurate if you mean that "if the test says you don't have the disease, there is a 99% chance that you don't have the disease". That same test can still be 85% wrong if it says you DO have the disease, though.

I doubt that hyping one side of this equation is fraud. Pushing the error in this direction seems like a good idea, anyway. If you have some weird illness, and the test comes back as a false positive, at least you'll continue to explore that possibility for a while. If it comes back as a false negative, then you'll spend a ton of time exploring alternatives which will be true negatives. Probably infuriating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

[mcguire]

Here's the fliers mentioned in the article:

https://www.harmonytest.com/content/dam/RMS/harmonytest/glob...

https://web.archive.org/web/20211116203541/https://myriadwom...

https://images.health.questdiagnostics.com/Web/QuestDiagnost...

I'd appreciate it if you could point out where any of them walk the potential customer through sensitivity, specificity, and the fact that if they test positive, there is an 80-90% chance that their will not be affected. I can't seem to find any of that.

[in_cahoots]

When I got my test results, they were clear that the odds of having a disorder were (for example) 1/144, even with a ‘positive’ result. This was through Natera. The problem is that this information is sent directly to the provider in most cases, so parents are left interpreting someone else’s interpretation of statistics. My midwife specifically told me that the test isn’t often wrong, even though the actual odds were there in the fine print.