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Negative Predictive Value

Definition
1. Patients with negative test that do not have disease
2. Assesses reliability of negative test
Indications
1. Puts Test Sensitivity in context of disease Prevalence
2. Lower disease Prevalence results in higher NPV
  1. Test Sensitivity effect minimized at low Prevalence
  2. False negatives decrease substantially
  3. Results in more reliable negative test
Calculation
1. NPV = (True negative) / (true and false negatives)

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This page was written by Scott Moses, MD. This page was last revised before 5/10/08, prior to consistent tracking of revision date. This page was last published on 5/10/2008. Please send comments and questions to the editor. Contact information may be found on the page About the Family Practice Notebook. These pages are best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0.