ArticlePloS one2023
Estimating the lifetime risk of a false positive screening test result.
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- American Society of Hematology 2026 guidelines on diagnosis of light chain amyloidosis.Blood advances · 2026Guideline
- Acceptability and perceptions of personalised risk-based cancer screening among health-care professionals and the general public: a systematic review and meta-analysis.The Lancet. Public health · 2025Pooled it
- Public (un)willingness to trade-off benefits and harms in decisions about cancer screening: A discrete choice experiment.Journal of medical screening · 2026Article
- Mitigating Clinical Confounding in AI Models: A Comparative Analysis of Associative and Causal-Fused AI for ICU Readmissions.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- How good are artificial intelligence tools at identifying benign skin lesions? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the specificity of artificial intelligence tools in diagnosing suspicious skin lesions.Skin health and disease · 2026Review
- Review
- Specificity of Celbrea, a novel noninvasive thermal screening device, in women with recent negative screening mammograms.Frontiers in oncology · 2026Article
- Interpretable AI for neural signal decoding in dementia: an EEG ensemble approach to differential diagnosis.Frontiers in neuroinformatics · 2026Article
- Evaluating AI Models for Pneumothorax Detection on Chest Radiographs: Diagnostic Accuracy and Clinical Trade-Offs.Cureus · 2025Article
- A Zebra in Horse's Clothing: Rethinking the Diagnosis of Rare Diseases.Molecular genetics & genomic medicine · 2025Review
- Promises and pitfalls of multi-cancer early detection using liquid biopsy tests.Nature reviews. Clinical oncology · 2025Review
- Review
- Reflux-Related Abnormalities at Distal oesophagus, Gastric Pouch and Anastomotic Site 4 Years After OAGB: Diagnostic Accuracies of Endoscopy Compared to Biopsy and of Symptoms Compared to Both.Obesity surgery · 2025Article
- Multi-cancer early detection tests: Attributes for clinical implementation.Cancer biomarkers : section A of Disease markers · 2025Article
- Review
- Shifting the Cancer Screening Paradigm: Developing a Multi-Biomarker Class Approach to Multi-Cancer Early Detection Testing.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- How will lung cancer screening and lung nodule management change the diagnostic and surgical lung cancer landscape?European respiratory review : an official journal of the European Respiratory Society · 2024Review
- Acoustic Analysis and Prediction of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Using Smartphone-Recorded Voice Segments.Mayo Clinic proceedings. Digital health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
False positive results in screening tests have potentially severe psychological, medical, and financial consequences for the recipient. However, there have been few efforts to quantify how the risk of a false positive accumulates over time. We seek to fill this gap by estimating the probability that an individual who adheres to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) screening guidelines will receive at least one false positive in a lifetime. To do so, we assembled a data set of 116 studies cited by the USPSTF that report the number of true positives, false negatives, true negatives, and false positives for the primary screening procedure for one of five cancers or six sexually transmitted diseases. We use these data to estimate the probability that an individual in one of 14 demographic subpopulations will receive at least one false positive for one of these eleven diseases in a lifetime. We specify a suitable statistical model to account for the hierarchical structure of the data, and we use the parametric bootstrap to quantify the uncertainty surrounding our estimates. The estimated probability of receiving at least one false positive in a lifetime is 85.5% (±0.9%) and 38.9% (±3.6%) for baseline groups of women and men, respectively. It is higher for subpopulations recommended to screen more frequently than the baseline, including more vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and men who have sex with men. Since screening technology is imperfect, false positives remain inevitable. The high lifetime risk of a false positive reveals the importance of educating patients about this phenomenon.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.