Consequences of treating false positive heparin-induced thrombocytopenia.

Identification of patients with heparin-induced thrombocytopenia is encumbered by false positive enzyme-linked immuno assay (ELISA) antibody results, therefore a serotonin release assay (SRA) is used for confirmation. Recently, several studies have demonstrated that increasing the optical density (OD) threshold (currently at 0.4) of the antibody test enhances the positive predictive value.