Screening for heart disease
Ben Goldacre on Twitter, about a “heart age test” that “has so far told eight in ten people that they are at higher risk of serious illness because their heart is prematurely aged.”
“that’s either a fumbled implementation turning coefficients into automated patient advice; or it’s a radical new NHS screening programme announced, oddly, only to individual members of the public, one by one, through an app”
Screening is always easy to sell, so it’s useful to remember a sound-bite: “Screening is the opposite of treatment: you come in healthy and go out sick”
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »