Home Health Tests Don’t Replace Doctor’s Checkup

Whether home health tests yield bad news or good news, doctors urge users to treat them as early warning indicators, not as definitive diagnoses.

Before you decide you have cancer, or start prescribing medicines for yourself, get a doctor to examine you.

Sometimes, tests can yield “positive” results because of some unrelated condition.

The pregnancy test, for example, detects the presence of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin. While usually associated with pregnancy, it can also be present because of a recent pregnancy, miscarriage or, in rare instances, a tumor, according to Judith Moreines, a spokeswoman for Whitehall-Robins Healthcare, which makes the ClearBlue Easy pregnancy test.

In other cases, the tests can yield “negative” results when a person is actually sick. In the case of AIDS, the test screens blood for antibodies, not the AIDS virus itself. If someone has been infected recently, antibodies may not yet have developed, and the test will be “negative.” During the lag until the virus is detectable, a person is highly infectious.

AIDS tests bring other problems, because many people consider an AIDS diagnosis to be an automatic death sentence.

When users of AIDS kits who test positive call for results, they will be switched to a trained counselor, rather than hearing an electronic voice, said Gary Noble, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, which makes the Confide AIDS test kit.

The callers will be told how to avoid infecting other people, and asked to inform past and future sexual partners that they may be at risk for HIV infection. They will also be told how to get medical help.

Powerful new medicines now offer hope that patients can be kept healthy for years, possibly even decades.

Noble said patients can call counselors for up to two years after being diagnosed, to help them deal with the emotional issues that come with being infected.

Identification will be by number, and counselors do not need to know the patients’ names.