Oscar or Panaroma

[Vinnyy]

Hi mummies to be,

So my wife is 7 weeks in and we are have been to TMC for our first checkup. I am writing here cause my wife is not that well versed in English so I am reading up and trying to dig up as much info as I can. Anyway we have chosen Dr Benjamin Tham after seeing the amount of positive reviews here. I have also been researching alot of advices about the 2 tests. Many have said that Oscar tend to have lots of false positive. TMC told us that Oscar is up to 95% accurate and panaroma is 99% but the price is almost double from what TMC have quoted us.

And I heard that NUH/Kkh have the igene/harmony test which is similar to panaroma but at a lower price. However after several calls and email to them, they told me that our gynae has to be from their hospital in order for us to do the test at their premise.


Thus we would like to seek opinions from mummies here which tests have you all chosen. And also if anyone is in a similar situation to us, what ways do we have to do in order to get the test done elsewhere.

Many thanks in advance,
Kelvin

 

[Twinkledust]

Hi mummies to be,

So my wife is 7 weeks in and we are have been to TMC for our first checkup. I am writing here cause my wife is not that well versed in English so I am reading up and trying to dig up as much info as I can. Anyway we have chosen Dr Benjamin Tham after seeing the amount of positive reviews here. I have also been researching alot of advices about the 2 tests. Many have said that Oscar tend to have lots of false positive. TMC told us that Oscar is up to 95% accurate and panaroma is 99% but the price is almost double from what TMC have quoted us.

And I heard that NUH/Kkh have the igene/harmony test which is similar to panaroma but at a lower price. However after several calls and email to them, they told me that our gynae has to be from their hospital in order for us to do the test at their premise.


Thus we would like to seek opinions from mummies here which tests have you all chosen. And also if anyone is in a similar situation to us, what ways do we have to do in order to get the test done elsewhere.

Many thanks in advance,
Kelvin

i would definitely say go for panaroma if your finances allows u just for a piece of mind. As oscar has many false positives and u might end up doing both and paying double plus the stress while waiting for panaroma results to return.

 

[axioms]

Lol "accuracy" takes into account both false positives and false negatives (aka you can have a high accuracy but with a pretty high false positive rate when the base rate of having a problem is super low) , there are many other technical measures like Specificity, sensitivity etc that you should be looking out for.

Go do the OSCAR if you believe it's 95% accuracy

Just look at the number of posters on this forum worrying about poor OSCAR results who then went for NIPT, even ammnio and turns out was false positive.

If you want to have chance of unnecessary mental stress go try OSCAR .

Extra fun if you are above 35, since if you are older they automatically adjust the odds so it will be worse That's why a lot of good doctors will strongly advise those above 35 to got for NIPT immediately cos OSCAR high chance will show bad odds

 

[axioms]

Here's an example say chance of a disease is 1 in 100,000.

You have a test that out of 100,000 will flag 10 cases as having the disease ("not ok" ) where actually only 1 is true case.

So you have right decisions 99,990 (correct ok) + 1 (correct "not ok" ) = 99,991 right decisions

You also have 9 wrong decision (incorrect "not ok" )

Accuracy = 99,991 right decision /100,000 = 99.991%.

Wow 99.991% accuracy.

But .if you one of the 10 flagged as "not ok", how? You might think so high accuracy sure goner.

Actually as mentioned above the test flags 10 as "not ok" cases，only 1 is really "not ok" .

So even if test say you "not ok", you actually only 1/10 = 10% to be truly "not okay".

This explains the many many cases of posters worrying about poor OSCAR results and coming back to say it turned out okay..

The numbers are made up, but it gives you an idea why accuracy rates cannot be interpreted straight forwardly when base rate (true rate of disease) is super low.

In other words if what we trying to detect is extremely rare, it is quite easy to get high accuracy rates by simply saying almost everyone is "ok" and yet have a piss poor record of correctly detecting real cases.

BTW

It actually also gives hope to even those who got high risk using NIPT tests because while those tests minimize false positives compared to OSCAR , even a "high risk' result by NIPT test has a reasonable chance to be wrong but much less likely than OSCAR where the sensitivity (true positive rate) is a joke.