What is it about?
Preanalytics has a strong impact on the glucose concentration meaured. Different glycolyis inhibitors are use but all of them have several drawbacks. WHO recommends glucose testing from tubes stored in ice water, however this is inpractical and only frequently used.
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Why is it important?
New tubes containing citrate fluoride EDTA (FCE) have been proposed as gold standard for glucose testing. However, these tubes inhibit glycolysis in a subset of the samples only, the will increase mean glucose concentrations and increase the prevalence of diabetes by about 50% if the traditional decision limits are used and these tubes have new challenges in their practical use.
Perspectives
We recommend to use Fluoride without citrate as glycolysis inhibitor until prospective studie have shown a real benefit for the patients in using FCE tubes.
DR Matthias Orth
Heidelberg university medical faculty of Mannheim
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Effects of different tube types on patient classification using current diabetes decision limits, Practical Laboratory Medicine, November 2019, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.plabm.2019.e00134.
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