Clinical Chemistry Podcast

Ethics for Laboratory Medicine 03.12.2019 10:21 ↓

Maintaining high ethical standards is a characteristic we expect in many professionals, but perhaps most in the field of medicine.  Although biomedical ethics is a relatively new field, there have been discussions of moral issues in medicine since ancient times.  The Hippocratic Oath, for instance, was written by Hippocrates at approximately 400 B.C.  It requires that a new physician swear to upho...

Laboratory Measurement's Contribution to the Replication and Application Crisis in Clinical Research 02.12.2019 7:46 ↓

Science is not just based on interesting findings.  One of the key elements in research reports is an informative description of the methods that were used to develop the experiment, to collect the data, and to analyze them.  Since this process rests on replication, reporting of methods is essential as it allows others to stage a similar experiment, to design an identical study, and to evaluate wh...

Circular RNAs as Urinary Biomarkers 06.11.2019 13:11 ↓

Circular RNAs have the unique topological feature of circularity among the RNAs species.  They are single-stranded, covalently closed, circular RNA molecules and are hypothesized to be generated largely through back-splicing of exons from precursor messenger RNAs.  Circular RNAs were once considered as aberrant splicing by-products, which were only present in minute amounts in cells.  The potentia...

ProBNP That Is Not Glycosylated at Threonine 71 Is Decreased with Obesity in Patients with Heart Failure 06.11.2019 14:06 ↓

Heart failure is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide with prevalence expected to increase over the next 20 years.  Early diagnosis and optimal management of heart failure are key to reducing its impact. Because B-type natriuretic peptide, or BNP, and amino terminal proBNP, or NT-proBNP, as well as their precursor proBNP, are secreted by the heart in direct proportion to the degree...

An Intact ACTH LC-MS/MS Assay as an Arbiter of Clinically Discordant Immunoassay Results 01.11.2019 6:16 ↓

Measurement of plasma adrenocorticotropic hormone, or ACTH, is key in the differential diagnosis of hypothalamic pituitary adrenal disorders. Two-site sandwich immunoassay dominate clinical testing of ACTH in North America.  However, discordant results among different assays have been repeatedly reported.  To help resolve this discrepancy, a multicenter effort developed a liquid chromatography tan...