This assessment of catastrophic spending at multiple cut-offs provides us with both the incidence as well as the intensity of catastrophic spending (O'Donnell et al. 2005).
Future studies should focus on the evaluation of two or multiple cut-off points.
We explored multiple cut-off levels, but associations with clinicopathological parameters and outcome for all the candidates remained relatively similar.
In case a study provided multiple cut-off points for BNPs analysis, the point giving the maximum overall accuracy was chosen.
In case multiple cut-off points for PCT analysis were provided in a same study, we choose the cut-off giving the maximum overall accuracy.
True positive rates (sensitivity) and false positive rates (1-specificity) for the discrimination between improvement and stability were plotted for multiple cut-off points.
The base rates of low scores in the normative sample were calculated for multiple cut-off scores for the entire battery.
A more robust estimate is obtained by using sensitivity and specificity values obtained at multiple cut-off points to draw a receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve.
Some may argue that having to calculate a D-dimer cut-off value is impractical in a clinical setting, and that the new value is really a series of multiple cut-off points.
When a study described multiple cut-off levels, the level corresponding to the most used cut-off among other included studies was used, as established after collecting all data.
The high number of included studies in our meta-analyses strengthens the power of our conclusions and enabled us to explore the diagnostic accuracy of the progesterone test for multiple cut-off values.
