(credit: Ian Humes/Flickr)
With just a wee prick and a few drips, researchers hope to one day test for a wide range of ailments. Such low-pain, low-drain blood diagnostics would mean doctors could ditch big needles and vein-hunting, making patient care more pleasant. And those mini blood tests could offer easy, non-invasive testing alternatives in resource-poor healthcare settings, such as clinics in developing countries.
But making that diagnostic dream into a clinical reality may be bloody challenging, new data suggests.
Tiny blood droplets that leak successively from a pricked finger can have widely variable contents, researchers reported in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology. In some cases, test results on such finger-bled droplets had nearly eight times more variation than vein-harvested blood samples—the gold standard. Only when the authors tested upwards of five drops combined (60 to 100 microliters) were they able to get accurate results. The study raises concerns that new diagnostic tests that rely on blood drops may yield inaccurate results.
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment