@samweisenthal.bsky.social

Pagano's Principles of Biostatistics does an excellent job with explaining conditional probabilities in an understandable way for clinicians

academic.oup.com/jrsssa/artic...

The easiest way to understand what assumptions are being made comes from understanding conditional probabilities.

Especially in this data-heavy era, we would argue that we should switch the way medical education teaches conditional probability – from calculating sensitivity and specificity using 2x2 tables to teaching conditional probabilities.

In this paper, we describe an example of understanding this dependence on covariates matters.

Epidemiology courses traditionally taught for medical students typically assume that sensitivity and specificity are independent of patient factors and are true constants. In fact, this is not the case. The clinical consequences of this have not been discussed in detail.