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DIANE L. LANGKAMP, MD
Department of Pediatrics University of Wisconsin Meriter Hospital 202 S Park St Madison, WI 53715

ASHA KRIPALANI, MD
University of Wisconsin Hospital 600 Highland Ave Madison, WI 53792

Am J Dis Child. 1990;144(2):137.

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

Sir.—Taubman et al¹ in the January 1989 issue of AJDC discuss an extremely important issue—use of a rapid latex agglutination test for the detection of group A β-hemolytic streptococcal pharyngitis in an office setting. Their study design demonstrates the importance of comparing a new test with "the gold standard" (ie, a reference laboratory culture) as well as with the customary test (ie, throat cultures incubated and interpreted in the pediatric office). The authors introduce a term, "percent of false-negative results (% FN*)," that they define as follows:

where TN indicates true negatives; TP, true positives; and FP, false positives.

In a situation like this, the risk of undetected group A β-hemolytic streptococcal pharyngitis (ie, the false-negative tests) is usually communicated by the negative predictive value (PV_neg) of the test, an established and frequently used term in clinical epidemiology. If the authors wish to refer to the proportion of . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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