Trauma-informed Approaches to Substance Use Interventions with Indigenous Peoples: A Scoping Review.

Indigenous Peoples experience disproportionately higher rates of problematic substance use. These problems are situated in a context of individual and intergenerational trauma from colonization, residential schools, and racist and discriminatory practices, policies, and services. Therefore, substance use interventions need to adopt a trauma-informed approach.

Critical comments to a recent EFLM recommendation for the review of reference intervals.

In a recent EFLM recommendation on reference intervals by Henny et al., the direct approach for determining reference intervals was proposed as the only presently accepted "gold" standard. Some essential drawbacks of the direct approach were not sufficiently emphasized, such as unacceptably wide confidence limits due to the limited number of observations claimed and the practical usability for only a limited age range.

Determination of dual parameter auto-sampling trigger thresholds for pollutant load monitoring in various land uses.

Environmental pollutants are health hazards and are typically transported during runoff events. Monitoring the loadings of these pollutants with auto-samplers require precise trigger thresholds to effectively account for total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) entering natural water bodies. Traditionally, auto-samplers are triggered by delaying the start of sampling until pollutant wave is present during rainfall event.

Permissible limits for uncertainty of measurement in laboratory medicine.

The international standard ISO 15189 requires that medical laboratories estimate the uncertainty of their quantitative test results obtained from patients' specimens. The standard does not provide details how and within which limits the measurement uncertainty should be determined. The most common concept for establishing permissible uncertainty limits is to relate them on biological variation defining the rate of false positive results or to base the limits on the state-of-the-art.

Multicentre evaluation of a second generation point-of-care assay with an extended range for the determination of N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide.

Background: In the second generation of the point-of-care (POC) assay Roche CARDIAC proBNP, the upper limit of the measuring range was extended from 3000 to 9000 ng/L.

Methods: A thirteen-site multicentre evaluation was carried out to assess the analytical performance of the POC NT-proBNP assay and to compare it with a laboratory N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) assay.

Results: In method comparisons of six lots of POC NT-proBNP with the lab reference method (Elecsys proBNP) mean bias ranged from -10 to +17%.