What is it about?

Heart failure is both common and on the rise throughout the world. The biomarker NT-proBNP is routinely measured in blood sample and is often used for monitoring of heart failure patients. There are several international medical decisions limits based on NT-proBNP for ruling out heart failure depending on the clinical context, but none of them take the different methods of measuring NT-proBNP into consideration. Data from the Swedish external quality assessment program for NT-proBNP from Equalis during 2011-2021 were studied and showed that the introduction of new methods in 2017 have caused a declining agreement between manufacturers when measuring NT-proBNP levels in the same blood sample. The limited standardization between NT-proBNP methods might lead to different treatment of patients with suspected heart failure, since the measured NT-proBNP levels are method-dependent while the medical guidelines for ruling out heart failure are not. This highlights the need for a better standardisation of methods for NT-proBNP determination.

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Why is it important?

It is important since your treatment regarding suspected heart failure might be different depending on which laboratory that analyses your blood sample for NT-proBNP.

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This page is a summary of: Interlaboratory variation for NT-proBNP among Swedish laboratories in an external quality program 2011–2021, Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CCLM), March 2023, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cclm-2023-0051.
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