Logical Diagnosis
Epidemiology is actually pretty neat (good thing I'm posting now and not 1 am tonight after reading the text book for ?? hours!). While typically thought of in relation to population medicine, it also addresses the logic of formulating a diagnosis.
You can assess the pre-test probability that an animal has a certain disease from the prevalence of the disease in the population. Once you have tested the animal, you still don't know if it has the disease - diagnostic tests are not 100% sensitive nor 100% specific, so the test result could be a false positive or false negative. The sensitivity (percent of true positives that are picked up by the test) and specificity (percent of true negatives that are counted negative by the test) values, coupled to the disease prevalence, can indicate the post-test probability that the animal has the disease.
It's neat to incorporate a bit of probability into diagnosis - it seems like a vet could be more successful with that approach (although I have a feeling few employ such methods).
You can assess the pre-test probability that an animal has a certain disease from the prevalence of the disease in the population. Once you have tested the animal, you still don't know if it has the disease - diagnostic tests are not 100% sensitive nor 100% specific, so the test result could be a false positive or false negative. The sensitivity (percent of true positives that are picked up by the test) and specificity (percent of true negatives that are counted negative by the test) values, coupled to the disease prevalence, can indicate the post-test probability that the animal has the disease.
It's neat to incorporate a bit of probability into diagnosis - it seems like a vet could be more successful with that approach (although I have a feeling few employ such methods).
posted by Claire at 17:33
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home