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Previous Volume 334:1197-1200 May 2, 1996 Number 18 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited Related Article by Langston, A. A. Related Article by FitzGerald, M. G.

To the Editor: The paper by FitzGerald et al. (Jan. 18 issue)¹ provides important data on the frequency of common mutations of the BRCA1 breast-cancer–susceptibility gene in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. However, in their discussion of the use of these data in counseling, the authors' calculation of the "predictive value" of the 185delAG is not as useful to clinicians as the "age-specific penetrance."

The predictive value of a test is the probability of a disease given a positive test result.² According to the application of Bayes' theorem, it is the product of the sensitivity of the test and the prevalence . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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