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Specificity (definition)

Last reviewed dd mmm yyyy. Last edited dd mmm yyyy

Authoring team

The specificity of a test can be described as the proportion of true negatives it detects of all the patients without the target disorder.

It is thus the proportion of patients without the target disorder who have a negative test result (specificity is the proportion of people who do not have a target disease that are tested negative).

All negatives are the sum of (detected) true negatives (TN) and (misdiagnosed) false positives (FP).

Target Disorder Present

Target Disorder Absent

Test result positive

True Positive (TP)

False Positive (FP)

Test result negative

False Negative (FN)

True Negative (TN)

Specificity is therefore:

  • TN / (TN + FP) x 100%

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