Why the study?
Does exercise testing elicit a high false-positive rate in apparently healthy women?
Does exercise testing elicit a high false-positive rate in apparently healthy women?
Exercise testing in apparently healthy women yields a low false-positive rate of 3.7% over a 5-year follow-up, challenging the belief that it elicits an unacceptably high false-positive rate.
Low false-positive rate in this cohort challenges prior concerns; leaves open confirmation via randomized trials before screening use.
In brief: Some experts believe that exercise testing in women elicits an unacceptably high false-positive rate. The authors studied the results of exercise testing in 192 apparently healthy women (mean age, 38.2 years) to assess the false-positive rate in ST-segment response. Based on the tests and a five-year follow-up, only seven women (3.7%) showed false-positive results. The authors suggest that varying methods of testing and interpretation may account for the high rate of false positivity in some testing centers.
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Murray et al. (1988) studied this question.
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