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Trevor Klee's avatar

Mirvie seems cool and useful, but you overstate its usefulness. Problems with your post:

1. From your post: "For otherwise low risk women, the test is 91% sensitive in predicting those who will develop the disease. Those who test negative can also be confidently reassured – it correctly identifies those who will not develop the disease 99.7% of the time."

From the paper: "We show that cfRNA signatures from a single blood draw can track pregnancy progression at the placental, maternal and fetal levels and can robustly predict pre-eclampsia, with a sensitivity of 75% and a positive predictive value of 32.3% (s.d., 3%)".

I understand there might be subsequent analyses that show the 91% and 99.7% data, but it's not in the paper. And also, if you're going to do subgroup analysis (i.e. for low risk), you need to prespecify.

2. The study only addresses pre-term eclampsia, and, as far as I can tell, Mirvie only claims to predict pre-term eclampsia. Deena had post-term eclampsia, which there's no evidence Mirvie can predict (and I don't think they claim to).

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