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A comment on Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of cancer. Parent comment

Re:Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of ... by black_puppydog on Friday January 19, 2018 @03:30AM (#16184861)
Well, in a study that only tests on cancer patients, there are no negative examples to wrongly be classified as positive. That's for the second study (mentioned in the article) to show.

Still, this would be great, probably combined with (nearly) equally simple follow-up tests.

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Re:Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of ... by pgt on Friday January 19, 2018 @03:39AM (#16184895)
False positive rate seems pretty key, or the test could be testing for brunettes where 70% of the population is brunette.
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Re:Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of ... by jlebrech on Friday January 19, 2018 @05:39AM (#16185301)
they can falsely diagnose the wrong type of cancer?
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Re:Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of ... by beberlei on Friday January 19, 2018 @05:45AM (#16185320)
This test is probably not being used for "what kind of cancer" but as a cheap and easy way for yearly/bi-yearly tests of the general population as part of prevention.
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Re:Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of ... by dx034 on Friday January 19, 2018 @07:54AM (#16185843)
With a 1% false positive rate that won't work I guess. False positive rate needs to be much smaller.
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Re:Trial of a blood test that detects eight common forms of ... by justinpombrio on Friday January 19, 2018 @03:02PM (#16189278)
I don't think they do. If someone tests positive, I imagine the next step would be to do more thorough (and expensive, and time-consuming) tests and find out for sure.
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