The emerge of a pandemic Current understanding of COVID-19 How to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection Management of COVID-19 Long COVID Vaccination—once and for all?

Introduction Emergency department (ED) medicine is a specialty that faces unique medical and organizational challenges. Emergency department staff must treat a wide variety of acute injuries and illnesses in a rapid and expedient manner to ensure optimal patient care. This makes logistical organization arguably more...

Content Introduction Diagnosing and treating sepsis Can PCT testing improve health care? Can PCT testing reduce health-care cost? Can PCT testing improve health care at reduced cost? Introduction Procalcitonin (PCT) is a 116 amino acid prohormone of calcitonin and katacalcin, both involved with...

Introduction This article features a general background of the analytical characteristics associated with cardiac troponin testing. It addresses the following areas: Introduction to troponin What is the 99^th percentile upper reference limit (URL) and why do we use it? Determination of the 99^th percentile...

Introduction Since the first publications on cardiac troponin (cTn) in the 1970s, around 20.000 scientific reports on this powerful biomarker of myocardial injury have been published. Over time, cTn assays improved their analytical performance and became the designated biomarker for ruling out or ruling in acute...

In health plasma/serum potassium (K⁺) is maintained within the approximate reference range of 3.5 to 5.2 mmol/L, with serum values being slightly higher (∼ 0.4 mmol/L) than those of plasma because the process of blood clotting, essential to recovery of serum samples, is associated with release of potassium from...

Transfusion of donated (allogenic) red blood cells is of undoubted life-saving benefit to those suffering rapid and massive blood loss (hemorrhage) due to major trauma, or complications during surgery and childbirth. However, the procedure is not without risk, and accumulated evidence over the past 2 decades has...

Because measurements of GFR are tedious, estimated GFRs based on creatinine or cystatin C are widely used for assessing kidney function. Both measured GFRs and the Staging System for CKD based on GFR have analytical and clinical shortcomings. The advantages of serum creatinine and cystatin C, and eGFR will be...

The diagnosis of pulmonary embolism is challenging due to the non-specificity of signs and symptoms and the very busy Emergency Departments to which the overall majority of patients with suspected PE present. While several well-validated diagnostic algorithms exist and are readily available, it is known that in many...

Calculation-based approaches to determining oxygen saturation, as used in some point-of-care tests, increasingly deviate from values measured directly by CO-oximetry as the partial pressure of oxygen in the blood decreases. Oxygen saturation should be measured by CO-oximetry when inaccuracies in calculations may...