Incidental finding of rare hemoglobin: hemoglobin Bari in northeast Spain.

Objectives: Cation exchange high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is one of the techniques available for determining glycated hemoglobin (HbA) and also the method of choice for structural hemoglobinopathies screening. The objective of this case is to show how in a routine HbA test it is possible to incidentally find a hemoglobinopathy.

Case Presentation: In a routine blood analysis, an abnormal value for the hemoglobin A2 (HbA) was obtained during the study of HbA with HPLC on the ADAMS™ A1c HA-8180T.

Detecting paraprotein interference on a direct bilirubin assay by reviewing the photometric reaction data.

Background: The direct bilirubin (D-Bil) assay on the AU Beckman Coulter instrumentation can be interfered by paraproteins, which may result in spurious D-Bil results. In a previous work, we took advantage of this fact to detect this interference, thus helping with the identification of patients with unsuspected monoclonal gammopathies. In this work, we investigate the possibility to detect interference based on the review of the photometric reactions, regardless of the D-Bil result.