Screening without a "gold standard": The Hui-Walter paradigm revisited

Citation
Wo. Johnson et al., Screening without a "gold standard": The Hui-Walter paradigm revisited, AM J EPIDEM, 153(9), 2001, pp. 921-924
Citations number
14
Categorie Soggetti
Envirnomentale Medicine & Public Health","Medical Research General Topics
Journal title
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY
ISSN journal
00029262 → ACNP
Volume
153
Issue
9
Year of publication
2001
Pages
921 - 924
Database
ISI
SICI code
0002-9262(20010501)153:9<921:SWA"ST>2.0.ZU;2-S
Abstract
The authors consider screening populations with two screening tests but whe re a definitive "gold standard" is not readily available. They discuss a re cent article in which a Bayesian approach to this problem is developed base d on data that are sampled from a single population. It was subsequently po inted out that such inferences will not necessarily be accurate in the sens e that standard errors for parameters may not decrease as n increases. This problem will generally occur when the data are insufficient to estimate al l of the parameters as is the case when screening a single population with two tests. If both tests are applied to units sampled from two populations, however, this particular difficulty disappears. In this article the author s further examine this issue and develop an approach based on sampling two populations that yields increasingly accurate inferences as the sample size increases.