Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the ratio of true to false positives is at greater than 5:1, it's hard to imagine the false positives causing net harm.
Where do you get 5:1? Maybe I don't know enough about heart disease but the numbers in the article seem pretty hard to parse. It sounds like many of those who got a bleep from their iWatch subsequently had some effect detected by standard tests. But that isn't the right number. We don't necessarily know that we should treat everyone who fails standard tests. Especially if our previous knowledge about such tests was l…
At least 84% of the positives were correct.
> It sounds like many of those who got a bleep from their iWatch subsequently had some effect detected by standard tests. But that isn't the right number. We don't necessarily know that we should treat everyone who fails standard tests. Especially if our previous knowledge about such tests was limited to patients where there was other evidence.
I agree, but there is a very important distinction to make here. When we don't know what to do with the results of a test, it can be wasteful and negative even when the results of the test are completely accurate.
That is the much bigger risk here. That the true positives are a waste of time and net negative all by themselves. They have the real potential for issues here, not the false positives.
Because the true positives outweigh the false positives by so much, for there to be net harm because of false positives, each one would have to do more damage than the effect of five true positives. I doubt that's the case. I'm pretty confident that either the test is an overall good thing, or the test is a bad thing because of true positives.