Adapting to telemedicine in the COVID-19 era: Feasibility of dried blood spot testing for hemoglobin A1c
Roberts et al.
The finding, in our words
Remote dried blood spot testing for HbA1c was feasible for telemedicine, with just over half of ordered tests completed and results available within a week for most who completed the test.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
In a 20-person proof-of-concept pilot among veterans with HIV, remote self-collection of dried blood spots for phosphatidylethanol monitoring was feasible and acceptable, with high return and analysis rates and positive feedback; a small first step toward decentralised alcohol biomarker monitoring rather than proof of it.
In an adolescent with cerebral palsy undergoing a home-based, remotely supervised sprint-intensity interval training intervention, dried blood spot testing demonstrated a 37.8% reduction in triglycerides and a 15.4% improvement in total cholesterol to HDL ratio. This illustrates how remote microsampling can support decentralized metabolic monitoring in pediatric disability rehabilitation.
Thirty-eight patients with rheumatic diseases showed high engagement with twice-daily smartphone symptom reporting (95% completion) and remote dried blood spot collection (84% returned samples, all viable for C-reactive protein analysis). Although symptoms varied considerably, clinically meaningful CRP changes were rare, confirming the feasibility of integrating microsampling with patient-generated health data in decentralised rheumatology research.
The study found reasonable agreement between finger-prick dried blood spot CRP measurements and venous reference assays in 100 rheumatoid arthritis patients, particularly at low to mid-range CRP values, and showed that weekly self-collected DBS CRP monitoring improved flare detection specificity to 72.7% compared with 54.5% for minimal sampling, supporting decentralised microsampling for remote arthritis management.
This study validated a method combining quantitative dried blood spots with DNA methylation analysis to monitor B-cell counts remotely, achieving 100% sensitivity and specificity for a specific clinical threshold. This decentralised approach facilitates patient-centric therapeutic drug monitoring for anti-CD20 therapies by overcoming the logistical barriers of regular venous sampling.