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Leah F. Tessler, MD; Judith M. E. Walsh, MD, MPH
University of California San Francisco

JAMA. 1997;277(20):1591.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In the study on the use of OMT for HIV antibody screening, Ms Gallo and coworkers¹ conclude that the sensitivity of OMT testing is 99.9% and that the specificity is 99.9%. Unfortunately, neither of these numbers is accurate since the true prevalence of disease in this population is not known. For a large number of individuals included in this study, a confirmatory serum HIV antibody test was not done.

Sensitivity is defined as the probability of a positive test when the disease is truly present.² Defining a test as "sensitive" therefore assumes that all true positives have been identified. Usually this is done by comparing the new test to a "gold standard," which in this case should be serologic HIV testing. This criterion standard should be applied to all individuals tested, not just to a select subset. The authors include 2382 "low-risk" subjects (defined as those with an . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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