kazbern said...
The blood test discussed in this article won't tell a patient anything about their functional disorder unless it is a result of infection by the bacteria being screened by the blood test.
Nail on head.
It'll only help a subset of patients with IBS. The rest will be as much in the dark as ever. It's better than nothing, but it's not like discovering a blood test which diagnoses
all IBS. The latter would be amazingly useful.
Edit: And it's not even 100% accurate.
The blood tests identified the two antibodies associated with IBS—anti-Cdtb and anti-vinculin—with greater than 90 percent certainty.Over 90% may sound like a lot, but that still leaves a large margin for error. The Prometheus IBD test isn't much less accurate than that and still it helps virtually nobody.
Disappointing.