Living in the COVID-19 era has made us all more familiar with doing medical tests at home.
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But that familiarity, and the rise of people hopping online to search for health information, has also led to a proliferation of other home medical tests.
And new research from the University of Wollongong says they're doing more harm than good.
Sold commercially without the need for a doctor to sign off and often marketed at healthy people, online tests can check all manner of health conditions and include STI checks, hormone profiling, tests for thyroid disease and food sensitivity.
According to University of Wollongong researcher Dr Patti Shih many of the tests being offered for sale offer limited or no medical benefits.
In an Australian-first study of nearly 500 tests available online - with prices ranging from $12.99 to almost $2000 - a team led by Dr Shih found only 10 per cent offered useful information that could improve people's health.
"Only 10 per cent offered potential clinical utility, that is, they provide useful, meaningful information that is actionable and leads to improvement in the consumer's health outcomes," Dr Shih said.
"We also found more than half (56 per cent) did not state that they offered any form of pre or post-test consultation, which is concerning."
The study revealed about one third of tests the had limited clinical utility; 41.9 per cent were non-evidence-based commercial health checks; and 16.7 per cent were tests whose methods and/or target conditions are not recognised by the general medical community.
Half (51 per cent) did not report analytical performance of the test or laboratory accreditation.
"When you've got people ordering or performing their own tests, there are a lot of potential harms they can experience," Dr Shih said.
"This can be because of errors - for example, being told they have a condition when they don't, because the test isn't managed in an accredited lab.
"It can be because of unnecessary diagnosis - if you do lots of tests on a healthy person, you will often find something, and you can suddenly have 'a condition' that would never have caused you problems."
"People can also be harmed if they make treatment decisions based on tests that have no evidence to support them, so will give you unhelpful or misleading information. And some of these tests cost a lot of money, especially the ones that were most unnecessary and inappropriate."
Dr Shih said she would like to see improved regulation of the industry and higher standards of evidence required to show the benefits and effectiveness for commercial online health tests.
"The size of the [direct to consumer] test market in Australia is growing and at the end of the day it is mostly healthy people who are using these tests and they're the people least likely to need them," she said.
"It's important that people aren't pushed by marketing to buy and use these kinds of tests unnecessarily, we need better reporting of health outcomes for DTC tests and more decision-support resources for consumers."
The tests studied differ from home collection kits like COVID-19 rapid antigen tests, or regular screening programs for bowel cancer, and are not the same as the self-monitoring tests for patients already diagnosed with conditions like diabetes.
Kate McIlwain
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
