It is
widely known that coag samples go off very rapidly…
I once
went to a multi-disciplinary conference in which all sorts of people met up at
an extremely overpriced hotel in the Lake District to talk about all thongs
anticoagulant. There was a talk from the chap who drove round collecting blood
samples who said he would drive here, there and thither collecting samples from
surgeries and clinics, spend the night at a guest house, collect more samples, *then*
take then to the lab for testing.
When I
asked about the sample age, the conference chairman stepped in and told me that
he could tell I had a laboratory background. Apparently lab people are obsessed
with sample age, and the chap insisted that INRs are stable for two days…
There was
a discussion
on the matter on the Facebook Medical Laboratory Scientists group… I say “discussion”;
just loads of people quoted random times.
Here’s an article
which claims INRs are good for a day. Mind you, how do we define “good”?
How much sample degradation can we accept? Realistically with a six-hour
cut-off I’ve never rejected many samples at all.
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