BACKGROUND The goal of diabetes treatment is maintaining near normoglycemia based on self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG). In this study, an evaluation of the analytical performance of the coulometry-based Optium Omega™ glucose meter designed for SMBG has been carried out. METHODS The assessment of precision and between-lot variability was based on glucose measurements in ethylene-diaminet...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the agreement between multislice CT (MSCT) and intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) to assess the in-stent lumen diameters and lumen areas of left main coronary artery (LMCA) stents. DESIGN Prospective, observational single centre study. SETTING A single tertiary referral centre. PATIENTS Consecutive patients with LMCA stenting excluding patients with atrial fibrillation ...

Background Despite numerous studies, Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) of biological therapies is still debated partly motivated by the accessibility to a ready-to-use monotest device capable delivering accurate results in timely manner without burden sample batching, therefore allowing immediate decision making. Objectives We aimed at comparing new Chorus Promonitor Adalimumab running fully au...

Introduction Faecal calprotectin (FC) is a routinely used marker for identifying and monitoring children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This non-invasive test is useful for screening children with gastrointestinal symptoms to avoid unnecessary invasive procedures. In this study, we validated for the first time the performance of a fully automated particle-enhanced turbidimetric immunoas...

Background Our previous study indicated that serum 1,5-anhydroglucitol (1,5-AG) levels slightly increased after a glucose load; therefore, this study was conducted to explore short-term changes in 1,5-AG levels after a steamed bread meal test (SBMT) and compare the agreement of 1,5-AG, glycated albumin (GA), and glycated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels between fasting and postprandial states afte...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether benchtop auto-analyzers (AAs) and arterial blood gas (ABG) analyzers, for measuring electrolyte levels of patients admitted to intensive care units (ICU), are equal and whether they can be used interchangeably. MATERIALS AND METHOD This study was conducted on 98 patients admitted to the ICU of the Institute of Medicine, Kathmandu, Nepal between 15 October and ...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Measuring respiratory-related changes in arterial pulse pressure is useful to guide fluid expansion in hemodynamically compromised patients. In the absence of automation, this can be uneasy in clinical practice. The objective of this study was to test an alternative approach (expiratory pause) that should be easier to apply. DESIGN Prospective observational study comparing tw...

Background. It is widely accepted that the introduction of the First International Standard for PSA assay (WHO96/670) improved the agreement between total PSA immunoassay. Less attention was given to the fact that the results obtained with WHO calibration turned out to be lower by 16-20% than the original Hybritech assay with the inevitable consequences on positive/negative false results. The a...

BACKGROUND Widespread use of D-dimer in recent years has led to the development of a number of new fully automated quantitative D-dimer assays. METHODS We evaluated the analytical performance of the particle-enhanced immunoturbidimetric assay Innovance D-DIMER (Siemens Medical Solutions) on the Behring Coagulation System (BCS) analyzer. RESULTS Within-run coefficients of variation (CVs) for...

Recording of breathing frequency is a basic requirement for respiratory physiology. Usual techniques are invasive and constraining. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) has recently been demonstrated to be a simple way to obtain respiration frequency at rest. In this study, we investigated whether this correlation is also observed during activity. We first compared RSA to the respiration frequenc...