Question

You are working in a clinical chemistry laboratory and are analyzing a plasma glucose sample. The sample is flagged by the analyzer for being "outside of linear range." You manually dilute the sample 1:2 and rerun it. Again, you receive an "outside linear range" alert. You decide to perform a different manual dilution. This time you manually dilute the original sample again; this time using a 1:3 dilution. The instrument gives you a glucose value of 150 mg/dL from this diluted sample. What is the actual patient glucose result that you should report to the physician?

Answer 1

The actual patient glucose result that should be reported to the physician is 25 mg/dL.

Step-by-step explanation:

In this scenario, the original plasma glucose sample was flagged by the analyzer for being outside of the linear range. The sample was then manually diluted twice, first with a 1:2 dilution and then with a 1:3 dilution. The instrument gave a glucose value of 150 mg/dL from the 1:3 diluted sample.

To determine the actual patient glucose result that should be reported to the physician, we need to take into account the dilutions that were performed. The final dilution factor is the product of the two individual dilutions, which in this case is 1:6 (1:2 x 1:3 = 1:6).

To calculate the actual patient glucose result, we divide the glucose value from the diluted sample (150 mg/dL) by the dilution factor (1:6). This gives us a result of 25 mg/dL, which is the actual patient glucose value that should be reported to the physician.