Methodology
The calculations and algorithms used to calculate and display risk estimates in Your Disease Risk are the product of an ongoing process of expert consensus. Epidemiologists, clinicians, and other health specialists regularly review the current scientific evidence for each disease, identifying established and probable risk factors for each. This information is then used to develop or revise calculations that generate a user’s risk of disease compared to average risk in the population for someone of the same age and sex.
A validation study found Your Disease Risk to provide well calibrated estimates of cancer risk in the general population. For individual women, the discriminatory accuracy for colon cancer was 0.67, for ovarian cancer 0.59, and for pancreatic cancer was 0.71. For individual men, the discriminatory accuracy for colon cancer was 0.71 and for pancreatic cancer was 0.72. These values exceed the performance of many other cancer risk prediction tools.
The approach used to calculate cancer risks in Your Disease Risk is also used to calculate the risks of the other diseases. Validation studies for these non-cancer estimates are ongoing.
Read more about this topic: Your Disease Risk
Famous quotes containing the word methodology:
“One might get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical views, fairy tales, instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.”
—Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994)