Home spit test for pre-eclampsia
Found this article on the BBC website. It seems that the test detects salivary urate. I know the BBC is aimed at a very technical audience but I would have expected a bit more critical viewing of the technology. Surely gout would also give rise to high salivary urate levels and gout is a common enough condition that people could appreciate the problem.
As a rule, I am in favour of greater point of care testing. I due expected it to be carried out by experienced, trained members of staff. I am very apprehensive about home testing. From my experience with a common feacal occult blood home testing kit, members of the people will find weird and wonderfull ways of getting things wrong. The test in question had two peel back panels, one for application of sample and one for reagent application. The panels were labelled but still samples were applied to the wrong panel. In some examples, the person has tried to peel back the correct panel, experienced some resistance from the glue fastening and stopped peeling. The sample was then applied under the finger grip area of the panel.
As the samples were sent to the laboratory for testing, we could spot the problems and report the errors appropriately. With complete home testing kits, it could be possible for the user to generate a result even though the test has been carried out incorrectly. There isn’t a trained member of staff to verify correct specimen collection and application.
Another common problem with moving traditional laboratory tests away from the laboratory is reagent storage and quality control. We commonly deal with a variety of reagents that need to be handled in different ways e.g. stored at room temperature, stored at -70 C. Can the public reliably store this kits?
Hopefully, the trial and the kit itself addresses my concerns because this is the inevitable future and I hope it gets done right. Failures in areas like this will only show my profession in a negative way, enough though we had no part in the testing process.