Use of data mining in the establishment of age-adjusted reference intervals for parathyroid hormone

What Was Tested

This observational study looks at Parathyroid Hormone (PTH 1-84).

Appropriately defined reference values are of vital importance for the correct interpretation of laboratory results.

However, the implementation of in-house reference intervals by traditional methods is rare due to difficulties in the selection of reference individuals, so indirect methods are often alternatively used.

Parathyroid hormone (PTH) is a crucial hormone for the metabolism of calcium and phosphorus whose result can lead to erroneous diagnoses and medical actions if adequate reference intervals are not readily available.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults and middle-aged adults.

How the Study Was Run

Retrospective observational study between 2014 and 2019.

All requests from individuals aged ≥ 18 years were considered if PTH was requested together with serum creatinine, 25-hydroxyvitamin D, calcium, albumin and phosphate (within their respective reference intervals).

Requests were grouped by age and sex.

Differences among partitions were assessed by the Harris-Boyd's test and reference intervals were determined by the non-parametrical calculation of percentiles 2.5 and 97.5.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Calcium, Data Mining, Parathyroid Hormone and Vitamin D.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism and Reference values.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is an observational study of Parathyroid Hormone (PTH 1-84).

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2020 (Clinica chimica acta; international journal of clinical chemistry), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Parathyroid Hormone (PTH 1-84) compound page, all human trials.