Likelihood ratios for genome medicine

Abstract

Patients are beginning to present to healthcare providers with the results of high-throughput individualized genotyping, and interpreting these results in the context of the explosive growth of literature linking individual variants with disease may seem daunting. However, we suggest that results of a personal genomic analysis may be viewed as a panel of many tests for multiple diseases. By using well-established methods of evidence based medicine, these very many parallel tests may be combined using likelihood ratios to report a post-test probability of disease for use in patient assessment. © 2010 BioMed Central Ltd.