Evaluation of a Simplified Upper Arm Device for Vacuum-Assisted Collection of Capillary Blood Specimens
Schaff et al.
The finding, in our words
Comfort Draw collected adequate capillary blood from the upper arm in 85.5 per cent of attempts for total blood volume and 95.1 per cent for serum volume, with 17 of 19 serum analytes meeting CLIA acceptance criteria against matched venous samples. The procedure scored a mean pain rating of 0.39 out of 10, indicating high patient acceptability, and the device’s simpler design may lower cost for decentralised diagnostics.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Capillary blood collected with Tasso+ devices demonstrated strong agreement with venous blood for primary Athlete Biological Passport markers (haemoglobin, reticulocytes, OFF-score, ABPS) with correlations ≥0.9, though platelet count showed poor concordance. Despite 44 of 209 samples failing pre-analytical checks mainly due to coagulation, high athlete acceptance and minimal pain support capillary sampling as a less invasive, viable alternative for decentralised anti-doping controls.
Requena-Tutusaus et al., Medicine and science in sports and exercise (paywalled) · source ↗
In a cohort of 62 participants evaluating home self-collection with the TassoPlus device, 38 returned samples, with 29% excluded due to insufficient plasma volume below 200 ΔL. Although viral load measurements in adequate samples correlated well with conventional testing (r = 0.800), the high failure rate and missed detection in low-volume viremic samples indicate that further technical refinements are necessary before clinical adoption.
A head-to-head of four upper-arm capillary devices, including TAP Micro Select, versus fingerstick and venous: experience and performance varied by device with none clearly superior, while analyte correlations with venous were similar across all.
Collier et al., Bioanalysis (paywalled) · source ↗
A vacuum-assisted upper-arm device collected a mean 538 µL and met the volume target in 85.5% of cases; 17 of 19 analytes met CLIA agreement with venous, with pain lower than fingerstick.
This meta-analysis found strong agreement between self-collected capillary blood and venous samples for laboratory results. Capillary sampling was associated with significantly lower pain scores than venipuncture, particularly when using upper arm devices rather than fingerprick methods.
Schröder et al., Clinical biochemistry (paywalled) · source ↗