A 69-year-old man presented with a long-standing thrombocytopenia and microcytic anemia. The automated platelet count was 67 10/ L (reference interval, 150 – 450 10/ L); therefore, EDTA-dependent pseudothrombocytopenia was excluded. The hemoglobin concentration was 10.5 g/dL (reference interval, 14 –18 g/dL). The patient denied having petechiae and reported no excessive bleeding in daily life. ...

In the filled-space (or Oppel-Kundt) illusion, the filled part of the stimulus for most observers appears longer in comparison with the empty one. In the first two experimental series of the present study, we investigated the illusory effect as a function of continuous filling (by a shaft-line segment) of the reference spatial interval of the three-dot stimulus. It was demonstrated that for the...

A physician from an outside hospital called our laboratory for help regarding interpretation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) results. She was confused by a report from her laboratory that reported the presence of “calcium oxalate crystals 3 ” upon microscopy examination of a CSF sample (Figure 1). The CSF findings were as follows: protein concentration, 0.9 g/L, (reference interval, 0.15– 0.35 g/L...

BACKGROUND Maternal thyroid dysfunction is common during pregnancy, and physiological changes during pregnancy can lead to the overdiagnosis of hyperthyroidism and misdiagnosis of hypothyroidism with nongestation-specific reference intervals. Our aim was to compare sequential with nonsequential methods for the evaluation of thyroid function in pregnant women. METHODS We tested pregnant women ...

BACKGROUND Establishment of the reference interval of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) is critical in the diagnosis of thyroid dysfunction and is affected by age, gender, iodine nutrition, and ethnicity. The aim of this study was to determine the reference intervals of TSH and free thyroxin (FT4) from a large, nationwide data of Korea where iodine intake is more than adequate. METHODS We ana...

BACKGROUND Reference ranges for electrocardiogram (ECG) intervals, heart rate, and QRS axis in general use by medical personnel and ECG readers are unrepresentative of true age- and sex-related values in large populations and are not based on modern electrocardiographic and ECG reading technology. METHODS AND RESULTS The results of ECG interpretation by cardiologists using digital technology ...

Magnesium is an essential element needed for health. Even though only 1% of the total body magnesium is present in blood, the serum magnesium concentration (SMC) is the predominant test used by medicine to assess magnesium status in patients. The traditional method to establish a reference interval for the SMC is flawed by the large number of "normal" individuals who have a subtle chronic negat...

low, particularly when it is 0.6, the dispersion of values for any individual will span only a small part of the reference interval. Reference values will thus be of little use, in particular for deciding whether a significant change has occurred. Conversely, when the index is high, particularly when it is 1.4, values from a single individual will cover much of the entire distribution of the re...

Interval analysis, when applied to the so called problem of experimental data fitting, appears to be still in its infancy. Sometimes, partly because of the unrivaled reliability of interval methods, we do not obtain any results at all. Worse yet, if this happens, then we are left in the state of complete ignorance concerning the unknown parameters of interest. This is in sharp contrast with wid...