Artefactual hypoglycaemia: and audit
- Department of Biochemistry, Southampton General Hospital, Southampton SO16 6YD, UK; abuemmanuel@hotmail.com
Hypoglycaemia is not an uncommon clinical presentation. However, it is important to distinguish spurious from genuine hypoglycaemia to prevent inappropriate further investigations and management. Many laboratories including ours frequently measure glucose in non-anticoagulated tubes. Delay in separation of serum from cells could result in artefactual hypoglycaemia from anaerobic glycolysis. This audit was undertaken to ensure our practice of measuring glucose in clotted samples does not result in artefactual hypoglycaemia.
We studied all inpatients with serum …
