2026 · The journal of maternal-fetal & neonatal medicine : the official journal of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine, the Federation of Asia and Oceania Perinatal Societies, the International Society of Perinatal Obstetricians · paywalled
Environmental risk factors for false-positive results in newborn screening for primary carnitine deficiency: a multicenter large-scale retrospective cohort study
Shang et al.
The finding, in our words
In a cohort of over 100,000 neonates, ambient temperature during dried blood spot drying was identified as the primary independent factor driving false-positive screening results for primary carnitine deficiency. Environmental exposure during sample drying significantly alters free carnitine levels, emphasising the need for controlled drying conditions in dried blood spot programmes.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Frequent dried blood spot sampling detected early changes in beta-cell function more effectively than mixed-meal tolerance tests or urine ratios, supporting its potential as a decentralised monitoring tool for clinical trials.
Dunseath et al., Diabetes care (paywalled) · source ↗
Enhanced visual and textual guidance significantly improved the quality of dried blood spots self-collected by children and adolescents, increasing the proportion of acceptable cards from 47.6% to 86.6%, which supports the feasibility of home sampling for therapeutic drug monitoring.
Ringeling et al., Therapeutic drug monitoring · source ↗
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
Among 8007 neonates screened using dried blood spots, the study identified prevalence rates for congenital hypothyroidism (1:2002), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (1:2002) and G6PD deficiency (1:900), with abnormal results confirmed by venous sampling. This demonstrates the practical utility of microsampling for decentralised newborn screening and subsequent clinical management.
Narawade et al., Indian journal of clinical biochemistry : IJCB (paywalled) · source ↗
Analysis of dried blood spots from 813 newborns demonstrated that extremely preterm infants have markedly elevated corticosterone and 17-hydroxyprogesterone, with the latter showing the strongest inverse correlation with gestational age, indicating these precursors better reflect adrenal immaturity than cortisol alone. This validates DBS as a practical tool for guiding postnatal steroid therapy in preterm infants by helping clinicians distinguish physiological adrenal immaturity from true insufficiency.