Utilisation of remote capillary blood testing in an outpatient clinic setting to improve shared decision making and patient and clinician experience: a validation and pilot study
Nwankwo et al.
The finding, in our words
Capillary finger-prick blood showed interchangeability with venous samples for glycated haemoglobin, total protein and C-reactive protein, while liver function and total IgE were less concordant yet still useful for remote monitoring. Remote capillary sampling improved shared decision making and patient experience in outpatient pathways.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Volumetric microsampling can enable patient-centred therapeutic drug monitoring with high patient preference and acceptable method validation for many drugs, but conversion from capillary to plasma and agreement with venous sampling varies by analyte and requires careful validation.
Tummala et al., Journal of clinical pharmacology (paywalled) · source ↗
Capillary fingerstick sampling showed high correlation and agreement with venous sampling for serum AMH but with proportional bias, so it may improve access to testing yet should not be considered fully interchangeable without further validation.
Lavadia et al., Clinical and experimental reproductive medicine (paywalled) · source ↗
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.
Home DBS sampling gave testosterone results that agreed well with venous blood in men on intramuscular testosterone undecanoate, but showed falsely high values in those using topical gel, likely from skin contamination. Patients preferred home collection for its convenience, suggesting DBS is viable for decentralised monitoring of injectable testosterone if patients are taught proper technique.
Olthof et al., Clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine (paywalled) · source ↗