Med lab blog

Test Description Cholesterol is synthesized in the liver from dietary fats. Its functions include being used in the production of bile salts and several of the steroid hormones, and as a part of cell membranes. Cholesterol is transported in the blood by the low density lipoproteins (LDLs, or “bad” cholesterol) and high density lipoproteins (HDLs, or “good” cholesterol). A great deal of research has focused on the role of cholesterol in heart disease. High levels of cholesterol in the blood (hypercholesterolemia), especially in combination with low levels of HDL, have been found to increase the person’s risk of atherosclerosis and heart disease. This test allows evaluation of this risk potential, assists in determining treatment options, and is used to monitor effectiveness of treatment. • In all adults aged 20 years or older, a fasting lipoprotein profile (total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides) should be obtained once every 5 years. If...

Test Description Chloride (Cl−) is the major anion of the extracellular fluid. Chloride levels have an inverse relationship with those of bicarbonate; thus, they reflect acid-base status. In individuals with too much base, urine chloride measurements help differentiate the cause of the problem: loss of salt through dehydration, vomiting, or use of diuretics (urinary chloride would be very low) or excess hormones such as cortisol or aldosterone (urinary chloride would be very high). Chloride has several functions, including maintaining electrical neutrality by counterbalancing cations such as sodium (NaCl, HCl), acting as one component of the buffering system, aiding in digestion, and helping to maintain osmotic pressure and water balance. The amount of chloride excreted by the kidneys in a 24-hour period is an indication of the patient’s electrolyte balance and mirror the dietary intake of chloride and of sodium ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ...

Test Description Chloride (Cl-) is the major anion of the extracellular fluid. Chloride levels have an inverse relationship with those of bicarbonate; thus, they reflect acid-base status. Chloride has several functions, including maintaining electrical neutrality by counterbalancing cations such as sodium (NaCl, HCl), acting as one component of the buffering system, aiding in digestion, and helping to maintain osmotic pressure and water balance. Because chloride is most often seen in combination with sodium, shifts in sodium levels result in corresponding shifts in chloride levels. Patients with elevated serum chloride levels ( hyperchloremia ) may experience weakness, deep rapid breathing, lethargy, and stupor, which may progress to coma. Patients with hypochloremia , or decreased serum chloride levels may exhibit hypertonicity of the muscles, tetany, and shallow breathing. Blood chloride testing is often evaluated as part of screening laboratory tests. It may also b...

Test Description Cervical biopsy involves taking samples of tissue from the cervix for examination. Biopsy typically follows a Pap smear which has indicated significant abnormalities or when an abnormal area is noted on the cervix during a pelvic examination. Minor cell changes are usually monitored through frequent Pap testing. There are several types of cervical biopsies: • Punch biopsy involves removing a small amount of tissue from an area using a small, round instrument. Multiple punch biopsies may be done. The punch biopsy is typically done in conjunction with a colposcopy. • Endocervical curettage (ECC) involves the curettage, or scraping of the endocervical canal lining. This is tissue which is not visible from the external cervical os. • Cone biopsy or cervical conization involves removal of a large cone-shaped section of tissue from the cervix. Cone biopsy may be done using the cold knife cone biopsy procedure (using a laser or surgical scalpel) or thro...

Test Description Chlamydia trachomatis is the most common cause of sexually transmitted disease in the United States. It is also responsible for trachoma, a serious eye infection. Chlamydia can cause cervicitis, urethritis, epididymitis, and proctitis. Mode of transmission for this bacterium includes direct contact through sexual activity or direct contact of the infant with the mother’s cervix during birth. Although prevalent, the disease is often unrecognized. Many women with chlamydial infections are asymptomatic. However, the consequences of untreated chlamydial infection in women include the development of pelvic inflammatory disease, resulting in possible infertility. Thus, testing for the organism is very important. This is accomplished through either a culture of the cervix or eye, or through detection of the antigen by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) technique. DNA testing using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methodology is the newest method of tes...

Test Description Ceruloplasmin is an alpha2-globulin protein that transports copper. It also regulates iron uptake by transferrin. Testing for ceruloplasmin gives direct information regarding the amount of copper in the blood serum. Ceruloplasmin levels increase during times of stress, infection, and pregnancy. This test is used to aid in the diagnosis of Wilson’s disease, a hereditary syndrome in which decreased levels of ceruloplasmin are manufactured by the liver. Without ceruloplasmin to transport it, copper accumulates in the tissues of the brain, eye, kidney, and liver. One of the hallmarks of this disease is the presence of copper deposits around the iris of the eye, known as Kayser-Fleischer rings. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ THE EVIDENCE FOR PRACTICE Serum ceruloplasmin should be routinely measured during the evaluation of unexplained hepatic, neurologic, or psychiatric abnormalities in children and adults thro...

Test Description Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is a glycoprotein that is normally produced by the fetus and secreted by gastrointestinal cells. In adults, it is normally found in trace amounts. However, CEA tends to increase in the case of malignancies. It is primarily nonspecific and thus is not used alone in cancer diagnosis. This test has been found to be effective in the early detection of colorectal cancer, with CEA levels rising several months before clinical symptoms appear. Smaller tumors found early in development will have low or normal CEA levels, whereas advanced or metastatic conditions are likely to have higher CEA levels. Measurement of CEA levels can also be helpful monitoring the response of the patient to cancer treatment, and for monitoring the patient for recurrence of cancer. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ THE EVIDENCE FOR PRACTICE • Drawing a CEA level has been recommended b...