For the validation exercise comparing questionnaire-derived and physicians' diagnoses, sensitivity, specificity and positive (PPV) and negative predictive values (NPV) were calculated with 95% confidence intervals (CIs).
Sensitivity is calculated as the proportion (or percentage) of malignancies correctly diagnosed, whereas specificity is the proportion (or percentage) of non-malignancies correctly diagnosed.
The aforementioned four model proteases, trypsin (serine protease), papain and cathepsin (cysteine proteases), and caspase-8 (caspase), were used to diagnose the specificity and efficacy of the chosen inhibitors when incubating with their preferred substrate.
As shown in Table 1, at the cut point 4.4 mmol/L, 87.8% of GDM women were diagnosed with specificity of 0.458 and predictive positive value and negative predictive value in the rational range.
Screening cut-off scores with sensitivities above 0.90 (0.95 for ASD and AD/HD) were established for most conditions, as well as cut-off scores to identify proxies to clinical diagnoses with specificities above 0.90 (0.95 for ASD and AD/HD).
In regard to prevalence rates, the GPs should positively trust their sensitivity in diagnosing MDE, and their specificity in diagnosing GAD by exclusion of patients without anxiety.
Although these companies require doctors to code diagnoses with great specificity, the useful information that is gathered is then discarded, whereas it might be used for epidemiologic purposes.
In comparison to the specialists' diagnoses, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and Cohen's kappa (95% CI) of the questionnaire for the diagnosis of migraine were 0.83, 0.99, 0.83, 0.99 and 0.82 (0.71–0.93), respectively; for the diagnosis of tension-type headache (TTH), they were 0.51, 0.99, 0.86, 0.92 and 0.59 (0.46–0.72), respectively.
When compared with all patients with definite diagnoses only, the specificity was slightly lower (0.90).
Discharge diagnoses show good specificity but poor sensitivity for detecting community-acquired sepsis and severe sepsis events.
