One of the more discouraging trends in the literature of drug testing is the rate at which the toxicology community seems willing to accept imprecision in the use of its technical terms of art. This practice never fails to evoke derision when detected in lay commentary, but I am increasingly struck by the convergence of professional and lay literature in this respect. In the drug testing litera...

The ratio of false-positive to false-negative findings (FP:FN ratio) is an informative metric that warrants further evaluation. The FP:FN ratio varies greatly across different epidemiologic areas. In genetic epidemiology, it has varied from very high values (possibly even >100:1) for associations reported in candidate-gene studies to very low values (1:100 or lower) for associations with genome...

To determine the number of false-negative results produced by inefficient extraction of drugs from meconium, three published procedures were compared by using previously confirmed positive and negative meconium specimens. The methods were not equivalent in their ability to extract drugs from the matrix. To determine the number of false positives reported by the use of screen-only (unconfirmed) ...

Acute ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is a serious disease in clinical practice. The rapid and accurate diagnosis of this critical illness can lead to prompt reperfusion, and it enables the reduction of cardiac ischemic damage and results in improved subsequent outcomes. The shorter the time to reperfusion, the greater the benefits. The American College of Cardiology/American...