Screening of newborn infants for cholestatic hepatobiliary disease

The criteria of Wilson and Jungner, 2 which have recently been updated and adopted by the national screening committee, are seen by many as the gold standard of screening assessment. 3 Mushtaq et al do not overtly state the hypothesis that they are testing. For this study, the statement of a hypothesis would not have been helpful as the aim was not hypothesis testing but estimation of test variables for a candidate test and assessment of the implications of applying such a test to the population.