Clinical Chemistry Podcast

Surgery is a common form of treatment in patients with solid tumors.  Depending on the cancer, surgery may be used to remove cancer that is contained within a specific area, to debulk a tumor, or to ease symptoms caused by a tumor.  In each case, it is critical to distinguish cancerous from noncancerous tissue during the operation. Today, pathologists perform rapid microscopic investigations of bi...

Cardiac troponin measured with newer generations of analytically highly sensitive assays have been investigated in accelerated discharge protocols on the assumption that they have an improved ability to detect and quantify cardiomyocyte injury more quickly than previous generation's assays. In the May 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry , Dr. Jaimi Greenslade from the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospi...

Amniocentesis is a common procedure usually performed to collect cells from the fetus to allow testing for abnormal chromosomes.  Cells from the amniotic fluid are collected through centrifugation, cultured, and after about two weeks, analyzed by fluorescent in situ hybridization, or FISH, or with a microarray to detect abnormal chromosome copy number changes or large chromosomal structural rearra...

High-density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol is often referred to as the "good" cholesterol due to its involvement in transport of cholesterol from peripheral tissues back to the liver during reverse cholesterol transport.  However, some studies have demonstrated that the size and composition of HTL particles may influence the mechanism and capacity for this cholesterol efflux and other possible...

Data on biological variation can be used in many ways, most notably for the diagnosis and monitoring of disease and also for setting analytical performance specifications.  In 2014, after the first strategic conference of the European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, a task force was established to develop criteria for evaluation of the literature on biological variation. ...

Studies have found that drugs are now so prevalent that over 10% of a population were found to have traces of Class A drugs on their fingerprints despite never using any of those drugs.  While fingerprints have been suggested as a possible sample to rapidly and noninvasively carry out drug testing, identifying drug users and not those who may have passively encountered a drug can be complex. In a...

Familial hypercholesterolemia is a frequent genetic disorder encountered in clinical practice and is associated with high levels of serum LDL cholesterol known as the "bad cholesterol." A diagnosis of familial hypercholesterolemia has important clinical implications with respect to risk of cardiovascular disease and a requirement for intensive pharmacological therapy. Often, the baseline LDL chole...

A paper in the March 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry describes a liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry procedure for multi-steroid profiling in Cushing syndrome and other disorders.  The lead author of that study is Dr. Graeme Eisenhofer, who is professor and the Chief of the Division of Clinical Neurochemistry at the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine at the Techni...

Commutability is an important concept in determining traceability and the relationship among different methods that are used to measure the same analyte but just how to describe and classify commutable materials is not always straightforward.  The March 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry published a series of three reports from the Working Group on Commutability of the International Federation of Cl...