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Technical Briefs |
Departments of
1
Internal Medicine and
2 Clinical Chemistry, St. Antonius Hospital Koekoekslaan 1, PO Box 2500, 3430 EM Nieuwegein, The Netherlands;
3
Central Laboratory Clinical Chemistry, Klinikum Innenstadt, Munich University Hospital, 80336 Munich, Germany
aauthor for correspondence: fax 31-30-6056357, e-mail schutgensvos@hetnet.nl
| The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below. |
D-Dimer, a classic coagulation marker, is increasingly used in the exclusion of venous thromboembolism and the evaluation of coagulopathies. As with all other coagulation tests, the sample material is citrate plasma. When the D-dimer test is performed on a clinical chemistry analyzer, however, the use of citrate plasma is a burden. Depending on whether other coagulation tests are requested, either an extra tube for the D-dimer determination or sample splitting is needed. Furthermore, because citrate plasma used for coagulation tests is centrifuged differently from heparin plasma and serum, it disturbs the clinical chemistry workflow. Because D-dimer will be used in an emergency setting, where a short turnaround time (TAT) is mandatory, it would be advantageous if D-dimers could also be determined in heparin plasma.
Although many investigators have studied D-dimer assays mainly in search of such clinical outcomes as sensitivity and negative predictive value (1)(2)(3), it is possible that differences in the (pre)analytic processes can lead to different results in the D-dimer assay. There are reports on the effect of freezing on D-dimer concentration (4)(5)(6)(7), but the effects of transport and type of analyzer have been less studied (8)(9).
The first objective of this study is the validation of D-dimer determinations using heparin plasma. The second objective of this study is to investigate whether the results of a D-dimer assay are influenced by different (pre)analytic processes, such as
The following articles in journals at HighWire Press have cited this article:
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G. Lippi and G. C. Guidi Effect of Specimen Collection on Routine Coagulation Assays and D-Dimer Measurement Clin. Chem., November 1, 2004; 50(11): 2150 - 2152. [Full Text] [PDF] |
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