Medical testing company regulatory filing citing medRxiv paper — Quest Diagnostics, 2025-03-19
Quest DiagnosticsQuest DiagnosticsNYSE DGX
Filings SEC · Quote Yahoo cited a paper published on medRxiv in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Regulator · Website as a basis for its claims. The company read the way the paper was written and the actual scope it demonstrated in sequence. It described where the stock price movement over the following month compared to past cases of the same type. This is a retrospective judgment written after knowing the results. The paper was read only up to the abstract.
The disclosure wrote the paper like this in the press release
When a U.S. listed company has something to inform its shareholders, the form it files with the Securities and Exchange Commission is called 8-K. Quest Diagnostics filed this document on 2025-03-19, with item numbers 7.01 Reg FD disclosure and 9.01 financial statements · exhibits. The company cited a paper published in medRxiv in the press release attached to the filing. If the sentence citing the paper is translated verbatim, it reads as follows.
The press release did not automatically identify the sentence citing the paper. Confirm it from the original link. Do not replace it with another paragraph.
What the reader sees first is where the company placed the paper in the press release. Next is determining whether the paper supports the company's entire claim or only part of it. To answer the latter question, one must read the full paper. This article, having read only the abstract, cannot answer that.
The scope of the paper mentioned in the abstract is limited to this.
The paper's title is Development and clinical validation of blood-based multibiomarker models for the evaluation of brain amyloid pathology and it was published in medRxiv on 2025-02-28. The authors are affiliated with Quest Diagnostics (United States), University of Florida, and Mount Sinai Medical Center. The summary at the beginning of the paper is called abstract. This article read only up to that point. This paragraph was written by a person after filtering a draft written by a machine through numerical comparison; it is of a different grade than a full reading of the paper.
This article was posted on medRxiv, a repository for preprints awaiting peer review. It is a study examining whether blood tests can distinguish brain pathology of Alzheimer's disease in patients with mild cognitive impairment. A model combining the ratio of amyloid in the blood, phosphorylated tau, and apolipoprotein E genotype was developed to assess how well it could predict amyloid PET positivity, and it was validated with over 4,000 actual clinical samples. The background is the growing importance of selecting patients for drugs that eliminate amyloid.
The abstract does not answer; the details remain in the main text and the appendix. This article, not going further, leaves the blanks as they are. Readers compare the two citations above to determine which sentence in the abstract corresponds to the excerpt cited by the company.
A month later, the stock price was within the top quarter of the sample.
The remaining return after subtracting the portion attributable to market movement is called excess return. The date is recorded in trading days, counting only the days the stock market is open. In calendar terms, 20 trading days amount to roughly a month. The excess return for the day of the regulatory filing and the following month is presented in the table below.
| Period | Excess return relative to the market | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Five trading days before the regulatory filing | +0.5% | Degree of movement before the filing |
| On the day of the regulatory filing | −3.8% | On the filing day or the first trading day following |
| +1~+5 trading days cumulative | −3.7% | one week |
| +1~+20 trading days cumulative | +8.5% | one month |
A bundle of past cases of the same type is called a sample. The position counted from the bottom is expressed as a percentile. The one-month excess return of +8.5% in this case is within the top quarter, corresponding to the 80% from the bottom among 142 samples.
| Sample scale (20 trading days) | Tenth from the bottom | Fourth from the bottom | Median | Top 25% | top 10% | this case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| excess return | −31.9% | −20.1% | −7.4% | +5.5% | +19.5% | +8.5% |
Half of the sample falls between the two central marks in the table. One checks from the table whether this case falls inside or outside. The sample collects cases where U.S. listed companies wrote papers in 8-K filings over the past ten years. The company itself is excluded from the sample. The numbers written here are past facts, not rules to apply to future cases.
After the regulatory filing, the company issued such documents
After the disclosure date, this company filed three 8-Ks. Here are only the item numbers. In 8-Ks without titles, the item numbers indicate the type of content. Whether it was an earnings announcement or a contract can be determined by the number. To learn what exactly happened, read the original text at each link.
- 2025-04-22 8-K Item 2.02,9.01 — Earnings announcement · Financial statements · Attached documents
- 2025-05-22 8-K Item 5.07 — Shareholders' meeting results
- 2025-07-22 8-K Item 2.02,9.01 — Earnings announcement · Financial statements · Attached documents
What this article did not answer
This article, which reads only abstracts, cannot answer what method the paper used, what it reviewed, and how far it went. The number of citations the company's paper has received after that can be verified again through the OpenAlexOpenAlex
Data source · Website citation count. The next thing to check is whether the company's next 8-K again cites the same paper.
Glossary
- 8-K
- A voluntary report submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission when a U.S. listed company has something to inform its shareholders. The type is indicated by item numbers such as earnings, contracts, and executive changes. All events in this article come from this document.
- Excess return
- The remainder obtained by subtracting the market's overall return from the stock's return. It is used to observe the company's unique movement after removing the portion attributable to the market's collective rise or fall.
- Trading day
- A date counting only the days when the stock market is open. Since weekends and holidays are excluded, 20 trading days correspond to roughly one calendar month.
- Sample and percentile
- A bundle of past cases of the same type is a sample, and the position from the bottom is expressed as a percentile. A percentile of 10 means that nine out of ten cases performed better than this case.
- Abstract
- A summary placed at the beginning of a paper. The author writes in a few sentences what was done, how it was done, and what results were obtained. Without reading the full text, one cannot know the details and limitations of the methods.