Aaron Simpson

The Canberra Hospital · Department of Chemical Pathology

Immunoassay procedures have a wide application in clinical medicine and as such are used throughout clinical biochemistry laboratories both for urgent and routine testing. Clinicians and laboratory personnel are often presented with immunoassay results which are inconsistent with clinical findings. Without a high index of suspicion interferences wi...

Objectives: While persons with overt renal failure have a well-described rise in troponin and NT-proBNP, it is less well described what the relationship is between cardiac markers and persons with impaired renal function, not requiring dialysis. Design & methods: We have collected ALL samples referred to our pathology practice over a 24h period...

Objectives: Cardiac troponins are specific for the heart, but not for the acute coronary syndrome. We wanted to assess how common elevated cardiac troponin concentrations were, in a population with significant non-cardiac disease. Design & methods: We measured both hs-cTnT and hs-cTnI on all samples submitted to the laboratory during one 24h per...

Objective: Thyroid disease can be subtle in its presentation and TSH reference intervals may be artifactually increased by including persons with sub-clinical thyroid disease. We have therefore used a thyroid disease-free population to determine TSH and fT4 reference intervals. Design: Apparently healthy subjects were assessed by health question...

Harmonisation of reference intervals for routine general chemistry analytes has been a goal for many years. Analytical bias may prevent this harmonisation. To determine if analytical bias is present when comparing methods, the use of commutable samples, or samples that have the same properties as the clinical samples routinely analysed, should be u...

Background: Many patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) for assessment of possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) have low cardiac troponin concentrations that change very little on repeat blood draw. It is unclear if a lack of change in cardiac troponin concentration can be used to identify acutely presenting patients at low risk of...

To determine the potential of opportunistic glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) testing of pathology samples to detect previously unknown diabetes. Pathology samples from participants collected for other reasons and suitable for HbA1c testing were utilised for opportunistic diabetes screening. HbA1c was measured with a Biorad Variant II turbo analyser and...