Even though most clinical STD results are accurate, false results can and do happen. If you are worried about getting false results, try professional and efficient STD testing in Portland. Healthcare professionals usually disclose the margin of error for various tests and sometimes run two different tests for the same STD. For example, the healthcare professional may take a urine sample and genital culture to test for an STD.
If you have gotten conflicting results from different samples or tests, it is important to redo the tests until you are certain about your health status. No diagnostic test is perfect, although some are more accurate than others. This post lists some of the factors that go into determining the accuracy of an STD test.
Specificity And Sensitivity
The advancements in medical technology have ensured that most tests available today are quite efficient. When judging how efficient a test is, you have to consider its sensitivity and specificity.
Specificity is a factor that determines the performance of a test when figuring out which test subjects do not have the disease. Accurate specificity is important for a test to ensure that the test can detect a negative state and will not produce many positive false test results.
The sensitivity factor shows how good a test is at finding out which test subjects have the disease. Accurate sensitivity is important to ensure that the test does not turn out many false-negative results and that it detects all positive cases.
False Positive Test Results
A false-positive result claims you have an STD, while in reality, you do not. STD tests are not perfect because the people designing them have to decide whether to have more false-positive or false-negative results. The calibration usually depends on how severe the STD you are testing for is and your healthcare provider’s ability to treat it.
The designers of healthcare tests consider false positives a necessary evil in cases of highly contagious STDs or require early treatment to prevent the spread or exacerbation of the condition. In such cases, healthcare providers do not want to miss a chance to treat the STD early, even if it means accidentally treating patients who do not have the disease. In such cases, false-negative results would cause much more trouble than a false positive would. Designers of STDs tests for such diseases will calibrate to have a bigger probability of producing false-positive test results than negative ones.
Causes Of Positive Test Results
The frequency with which a test gives false-negative or false-positive test results depends on more than the sensitivity and specificity of the test. Test results are also affected by how rare or common a specific disease is within a given population. Rare diseases are much more likely to produce a higher statistical probability. In contrast, the same test will produce fewer false positives when the same disease affects a large population. These calculations are reached using a statistical method called positive predictive value.
False Negative Test Results
False-negative test results are those that give you a clean bill of health, yet you have an undiagnosed STD. When STD test designers create a test with a higher probability of producing false-negative test results than positive ones, it is likely to be for an easily treatable disease, does not have severe long-term consequences, and is not highly contagious.
STD tests are likely to produce false negatives in cases where the disease will not cause severe social health consequences if the disease is missed during testing. If the disease has a grueling or expensive treatment procedure, it is deemed better to miss a few cases than subject test subjects’ treatment without certainty that they need it.
How To Cope With False Positive Test Results
Imagine you have just gotten two conflicting test results for the same STD; what should you do? Your actions should depend on the disease diagnosed. If the STD has a simple treatment procedure without any severe side effects, there may not be any need to seek further diagnostic tests. It may be easier to take the medication prescribed to you.
Suppose you have been diagnosed with an STD that requires a strict treatment procedure that is likely to have severe side effects. In that case, you may be required to take another diagnostic test to confirm your initial diagnosis. It is improbable that false or conflicting test results will persist when you take subsequent tests.
If you need STD, it is wise to avoid DIY home test kits and rely on professional clinics.
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