Clinical Chemistry Podcast

Medical laboratories provide valuable services to aid in patient diagnosis and management, but systematic evidence of laboratory medicine's specific contribution to the overall process of healthcare is not easy to come by. Even the widely quoted claim that laboratory medicine results are responsible for a 70% of all clinical decisions seems to elude objective verification.

Over the past 20 years or so there have been several studies published showing an association between decreased concentrations of vitamin D in blood and the risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, fractures, even overall mortality.

Rapid urine pregnancy tests have been available for over 30 years. They can be performed in minutes and are used at home, in doctors' offices and in emergency rooms. Doctors in particular rely on these tests to rule out pregnancy in order to prevent fetal injury or death that could be caused by certain medical procedures or drugs.

Recently, the New England Journal of Medicine partnered with Area9 Learning, a physician-led pioneer in adaptive learning, to create a platform with smart technology that adapts to clinicians' learning goals and knowledge gaps to deliver the information they need to know.

Aggressive strategies to lower Low Density Lipoprotein cholesterol in circulation are recommended for prevention of cardiovascular events. Most often laboratories report LDL-cholesterol based on an equation using measured values of total cholesterol, HDL - cholesterol and triglycerides, the so called Friedewald calculation named after the first author who published that work in Clinical Chemistry...

Medical laboratories frequently encounter clinically unexpected results that require timely clinical evaluation because they may indicate an imminent life-threatening condition or a major clinical deterioration. Laboratories, therefore, need to identify and report such results sooner than they normally would, and have policies and procedures that minimize the possibility of patient harm due to del...

In December 2013 the genetics laboratory 23andMe stopped marketing direct-to-consumer disease predictive genetic testing in order to comply with a directive from the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA's action was intended to protect the American public from questionable disease risk predictions.

Big data now seems to be everywhere. Google search queries are used to predict flu outbreaks and airline statistics or mined to determine the best hour of which day to book plane tickets. Clinical laboratories can also benefit from these trends. Given the emerging importance of reproducible data analysis pipelines, one could think of a special group of trained big data experts that could be availa...

Hemoglobin A1c is widely used to monitor glycemic control and is now recommended for use in the diagnosis of diabetes. Although hemoglobin A1c has high reliability compared to the oral glucose tolerance test, there are certain settings in which such testing may be problematic and there is a growing interest in alternative markers of hyperglycemia.

Although hemoglobin A 1 C has high reliability , there a re certain settings in which hemoglobin A1C testing is thought to be problematic. 1 , 5 - anhydroglucitol or 1,5 - deoxyglucose is a monosaccharide originating mainly fr om foods and closely resembles glucose in structure , but is usually excreted by the kidneys.

Human saliva has been increasingly used for biomarker development to allow noninvasive detection of diseases. Extracellular RNA was discovered in saliva about 10 years ago, and since then the nature, origin , and characterization of salivary RNA have been actively pursued.

Prenatal testing using blood specimens rather than more invasive sampling has been successfully used for common chromosome disorders and for clinically significant copy number variations . H owever , detecting single gene disorders which are caused by mutations remains an analytical challenge.

In the last year, multiple clinical studies have shown the diagnosti c power of testing a patient's exome. Clinical exome testing is now available at over a dozen clinical laboratories in the US , and has been performed for thousands of patients.

Next generation sequencing (NGS)13 technology, also known as massively parallel sequencing (MPS), is being incorporated rapidly to clinical laboratory testing. Current applications include detection of germline variants in inherited diseases, somatic variants in cancers, subpopulations of circulating cell-free DNA, and single viral or microbial genomes in infections or metamicrobial genomes in nor...

Extreme sports, extreme eating, extreme weight loss, extreme makeovers, just when you think you've heard it all, how about Extreme PCR?

Extreme sports, extreme eating, extreme weight loss, extreme makeovers, just when you think you've heard it all, how about Extreme PCR?

Familial hypercholesterolemia is a genetic disorder characterized by increased plasma concentrations of low density lipoprotein cholesterol and premature symptoms of coronary heart disease. Early identification of at-risk individuals allows changes in lifestyle including dietary intervention and drug treatment. In the January 2015 issue of Clinical Chemistry, a Special Issue devoted to Molecular D...

For decades iron has been thought of as beneficial for the body. Most everyone knows that iron deficiency is harmful and that the condition should be treated by additional iron in the diet. However, too much iron can also be harmful to the body. Ferritin is a protein that stores iron and measurement of ferritin in serum is a measure of the iron deposits in the body.

Biobanking for clinical or research purposes includes the collection, processing, storage and analysis of biological specimens. It is now well-recognized that biobanking involves a complex array of technical, ethical, and regulatory considerations.

Kidney cancer is among the ten most frequently occurring cancers in the Western world and its incidence has been steadily rising each year. In the absence of symptoms, about 30% of patients with renalcell carcinomas are diagnosed with disease already in the metastatic stage.