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Blood test results inconsistent in finger prick tests, study reveals
Baku, November 19, AZERTAC
A drop of blood can’t decide your destiny. A new study has found that finger prick blood tests can often be misleading and results may be inaccurate.
The findings suggest that health care professionals must take care to avoid skewed results as they design new protocols and technologies that rely on finger prick blood. “We began looking at this after we got some surprising results from our controls in an earlier study,” said lead investigator Rebecca Richards-Kortum from Rice University in US.
The researchers noticed that there was wide variation in some of the benchmark tests that they were performing on hospital-grade blood analysers.
The benchmark controls are used to gauge the accuracy of test results from a new technology under study, so variation among the control data was a sign that something was amiss.
The researchers designed a simple protocol to test whether there was actual variation, and if so, how much. They drew six successive 20-microlitre droplets of blood from 11 donors.
As an additional test to determine whether minimum droplet size might also affect the results, they drew 10 successive 10-microlitre droplets from seven additional donors. Each 20-microlitre droplet was analysed with a hospital-grade blood analyser for hemoglobin concentration, total white blood cells (WBC) count, platelet count and three-part WBC differential, a test that measures the ratio of different types of white blood cells, including lymphocytes and granulocytes.
Each 10-microlitre droplet was tested for hemoglobin concentration with a popular point-of-care blood analyser used in many clinics and blood centres.
Researchers found that hemoglobin content, platelet count and WBC count each varied significantly from drop to drop.
Researchers found that averaging the results of the droplet tests could produce results that were on par with venous blood tests, but tests on six to nine drops blood were needed to achieve consistent results.
The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology.
