Clinical Chemistry Podcast

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 normal or altered human flora. Each application is unique and has its advantages and disadvantages.

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 Diagnostics, a group of researchers in a multi-center study describes a genetic risk score procedure that distinguishes familial hypercholesterolemia patients from healthy subjects.

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.

Over the past decade genomic testing has emerged as a clinical tool available in multiple hospital and independent laboratories across the United States. In the November 2014 issue of Clinical Chemistry, an opinion article titled "Clinical Genomics: When Whole Genome Sequencing Is like a Whole-body CT Scan" framed the clinical utility of genomic testing in the context of another recently transformative test, whole-body computed tomography scanning, more commonly known as a CT scan.

In August 2014, the first patient with the Ebola virus disease arrived in the United States and was transported to Emory Hospital in Atlanta. While hospitals and laboratories knew that it was only a matter of time before this occurred, subsequent experience has shown that not all institutions in the U.S. were equally prepared for this eventuality. In this special podcast from Clinical Chemistry, we're joined by two members of the laboratory team that treated the first healthcare workers arriving from West Africa.

Turnaround times are often long in PCR-based tests because multiple reactions are usually performed in parallel using programmable thermal cyclers. These methods typically use a single protocol, placing constraints on assay design.