The usefulness of the likelihood ratio in the diagnosis of dyspepsia and gastroesophageal reflux disease

Clinicians are familiar with the concepts of sensitivity and specificity to describe the accuracy of a diagnostic test. These measures do not always express the probability that a patient has a disease with a given test result as this will vary with the prevalence of the disorder in the population. The likelihood ratio is a more clinically relevant method of reporting accuracy, and the probability of having a disease after a positive or …