One in twenty

Everyday living
1

Hi I have just been on the barts ms log and there is an article posted by the prof saying that a recent study of postmortems done on ms people has shown that one in twenty have been misdiagnosed. That is quite high I think. MOYNA xxx

2

It’s interesting how different ways of expressing it can make it sound better/worse. Exactly the same statistic expressed differently would be that 95% of people are correctly diagnosed. Put that way round, correct diagnosis sounds quite high, doesn’t it? I don’t know how it compares with other diseases. Does anything have a 100% correct diagnosis rate? Tina

3

For a disease which involve treatment with seriously potent drugs I would want more than a 95%. A cancer Dx would be 100% or thereabouts. RRMS is more accurate. It is the PPMS is were most of the misdx are I reckon. I suppose there is no potent treatment there anyway.

4

I would rather be misdiagnosed and treated than go undiagnosed and only receive treatment when it was too late, as happened to my lovely friend who died of a brain tumour after being told she was stressed and to try aromatherapy :frowning:

5

Mmmm, wonder if theyll finally know just exactly what Im suffering from, after a pm eh?

pollx

6

I actually read an article where quite a few poeple with autopies are found to have MS yet have never suffered symptoms, its quite bizarre really.

7

Like Tina said - 5% error = 95% correct.
It’s funny that 5% is exactly the point where statistical significance starts.
What matters here is whether the mis-Dxes were false positive or false negatives - and the percentage of each.

Go back a few years (before MRI scanners), and there were a lot of old people Dx-ed as with Alzheimers, depite the fact that it was only possible to examine the brain post-mortem. A correct Dx would have been SDAT (Senile Dementia of the Alzheimers Type) - but hey, who cares (until you’re old yourself).

I have known of one tumor that was wrongly Dx-ed as Pneumonia. It was only when the patient failed to respond to medication that further investigation found the tumour which was, by then, inoperable.

Geoff