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Dr. George Lundberg, a well-known physician and editor, recently tackled the statistical effects of a growing trend in non-sick patient testing.
He does not mention the prudence of coming in for early preventative testing. Neither does he explore any reasons for the trend toward testing among the healthy. Instead, he focuses on a novel perspective, which he uses "arithmetic" to uncover.
In short, he concludes that the more healthy patients seek medical testing, the greater the prevalence of false positives will be. But the numbers paint a far more striking portrait.
Out of 1000 people, he says, with a pretest probability -- or how many people in a testing sample will likely have the disease -- of 2%, 20 people will have the disease, and 980 will not.
The accuracy of the test must also be accounted for. A 95% accuracy level ("specificity" and "sensitivity" level), Dr. Lundberg says, will yield 19 true positives and 1 false negative among the 20 who have the disease, and will yield 49 false positives among the 980 who do not have the disease.
Out of 1000 people, therefore, under these statistical probabilities, 49 out of 1000 people will be led on a "wild goose chase," and 19 people will be properly diagnosed. The more healthy people apply for this test, the lower the pretest probability will be, and the higher the number of false positives there will be (49 in this case), relative to the number of true positives.
Dr. Lundgren then hovers around the consequence of more tests, which is costly for insurance carriers and mentally and spiritually fatiguing for anxious patients.
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