"The Rising Importance of Pre-Analytical Phase in Medical and Research Laboratory, A New Challenge in the Omics Era"

Abstract

Laboratory analysis involves three main phases: pre-analytical, analytical and post analytical. For a long time, analytical and post-analytical phases were deemed important in medical biology. However, in the last few years, there is growing awareness about pre analytical aspects and issues making it the new major challenge in medical laboratory. Pre analytical phase encompasses a large range of variables that are associated with patient characteristics, sample collection and sample processing. Pre analytical phase is of paramount importance in medical diagnostics, but it continues to be underestimated in research and clinical trials. A paradigm shift in the quality management of pre analytical phase is overdue, especially with the increase of clinical omics application such as metabolomics.

Optimization of Tissue Handling and Processing in the Era of Precision Medicine: A Practical Recommendation from a Multidisciplinary Panel of Indian Experts

“…9 The relevance of these preanalytical tissue factors is largely ignored in India. 48 This results in the wastage of resources, 49 particularly the expensive analytic components of molecular testing, yielding suboptimal quality of nucleic acids, and thus, affecting the downstream processing and results. The expert panel provided recommendations for the collection, processing, fixation, and block preparation of the tissue to ensure the high quality of biospecimens.…”

“…9 The relevance of these preanalytical tissue factors is largely ignored in India. 48 This results in the wastage of resources, 49 particularly the expensive analytic components of molecular testing, yielding Fig. 2 Illustration of the minimum tissue requirements for various molecular testing procedures using lung cancer as an example.…”

Drug interference with biochemical laboratory tests

“…Laboratory practice is a cyclical process, typically divided in the preanalytical, analytical and postanalytical phase, where the preanalytical phase is considered as the most vulnerable part of the total testing process ( 12 ). Prevention of preanalytical errors and subsequent prevention of inappropriate treatment of patients due to incorrect test results, requires the permanent awareness of the primary factors linked to patient variables, sample collection and processing ( 13 ). Amongst patient characteristics, the most important are age, gender, feeding state, physiological changes and drug intake.…”