www.aacc.org/publications/cln/2009/september/Pages/Cove -
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Published on: 9/1/2009
Last Visited: 9/19/2009
Bone markers are one such group of analytes the committee hopes to study in the future, according to Jones and Michael Bennett, PhD, committee chair and professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at University of Pennsylvania and director of metabolic disease laboratory at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
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Bennett added that standard intervals would eliminate much guesswork for labs.
s for amino acids and steroid hormones, the AACC-proposed adjunct study could give the committee as much as 21 years of data, Bennett noted.
"At the start of the study, the kids will be small babies, and there will be blood draws throughout these kids' childhoods," he explained.
"This kind of material has thus far has been unavailable to children's hospitals," he added.
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Besides the sheer enormity of the NCS study sample, the AACC committee is excited at the prospect of accessing an overwhelmingly healthy population, Jones and Bennett emphasized.
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"It's very costly to recruit healthy individuals because there's a big ethics approval process," Bennett explained.
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Labs find values for children under age 3 particularly troublesome, Jones and Bennett agreed, because these children have a limited volume of blood.
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Bennett sees the AACC proposal as a win-win proposition with huge benefits, but emphasizes that even if NCS were to accept the proposal, both sides need to take several steps-including finalizing details, setting a budget, and securing funding-before the study starts.
If AACC's proposal is accepted, its adjunct study could start sometime after the launch of the main study, currently anticipated in 2011.
Bennett is both hopeful and wistful about the project.
"If the proposal is accepted, it will provide a starting point to getting standards reference intervals for analytes in a pediatric population, for all ethnic groups, in both rural and urban areas," Bennett explained.