All the others had false positive results, which means they had no clinical abnormalities on their cervix.
The researchers also found there were no false positive results - where cancer is inaccurately thought to be present.
They suggest that testing the serum of patients alone is not enough and the false positive results could be avoided by adding urine tests as well.
One problem is that it is amazingly easy to get false positive results when scanning through complicated data sets and searching in the dark for correlations between genes and disease.
While these tests can detect cancer, they also can produce false positive results that lead to unnecessary and uncomfortable biopsies and treatments that carry undesirable side effects such as impotence and urinary incontinence.
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Many yield lots of false-positive results, which lead to unnecessary (and risky) treatments.
But false-positive results raise the specter that women could choose to terminate healthy pregnancies if they don't receive appropriate follow-up care.
First, PSA levels generally increase with age and can be inflated because of more benign problems in the prostate, leading to false-positive results.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission said that they didn't find home test kits useful for detecting lead because in their test, they found too many false negatives and a few false positive test results.
Professors Laurence Cole and Sigi Rotmensch at Yale University School of Medicine said the false-positive results of the tests were due to the presence of human antibodies, called heterophil antibodies, which are present in a large number of people who do not have cancer.
In her lab, Dr. Cherry said she had found four out of six positive results for Trisomy 18, or Edwards syndrome, which the tests also detect, appeared to be false alarms after follow-up testing.
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