Avoidable Blood Loss in Critical Care and Patient Blood Management: Scoping Review of Diagnostic Blood Loss.

Background: Anemia remains one of the most common comorbidities in intensive care patients worldwide. The cause of anemia is often multifactorial and triggered by underlying disease, comorbidities, and iatrogenic factors, such as diagnostic phlebotomies. As anemia is associated with a worse outcome, especially in intensive care patients, unnecessary iatrogenic blood loss must be avoided.

High-resolution pediatric reference intervals for 15 biochemical analytes described using fractional polynomials.

Objectives: Assessment of children's laboratory test results requires consideration of the extensive changes that occur during physiological development and result in pronounced sex- and age-specific dynamics in many biochemical analytes. Pediatric reference intervals have to account for these dynamics, but ethical and practical challenges limit the availability of appropriate pediatric reference intervals that cover children from birth to adulthood. We have therefore initiated the multi-center data-driven project (Next-Generation Pediatric Reference Intervals) to create pediatric reference intervals using data from laboratory information systems.

Evaluation of the sensitivity and specificity of a novel line immunoassay for the detection of criteria and non-criteria antiphospholipid antibodies in comparison to established ELISAs.

Background: Persistent antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) constitute the serological hallmark of the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). Recently, various new assay technologies for the detection of aPL better suited to multiplex reaction environments than ELISAs emerged. We evaluated the diagnostic performance of such a novel line immunoassay (LIA) for the simultaneous detection of 10 different aPL.

Next-generation reference intervals for pediatric hematology.

Background Interpreting hematology analytes in children is challenging due to the extensive changes in hematopoiesis that accompany physiological development and lead to pronounced sex- and age-specific dynamics. Continuous percentile charts from birth to adulthood allow accurate consideration of these dynamics. However, the ethical and practical challenges unique to pediatric reference intervals have restricted the creation of such percentile charts, and limitations in current approaches to laboratory test result displays restrict their use when guiding clinical decisions.

Evaluation of antiphospholipid antibody assays using latent class analysis to address the lack of a reference standard.

Background: Method evaluation of new assays for the detection of antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) such as anti-cardiolipin (aCL) or anti-β2-glycoprotein I (aβ2-GPI) is challenging, as no internationally accepted reference material is available yet. Besides a lack of standardization, unacceptable inter-laboratory comparability of established tests is regularly observed. Owing to the absence of a commonly accepted reference standard, the evaluation of two research surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor assays was performed using statistical methods from latent class analysis (LCA).