White Blood Cell Count in Primary Care

Abstract

In primary care, our local pediatricians still perform white blood cell (WBC) count obtained by manual microscopy. The goal of this study was to compare microscopic WBC count and HemoCue WBC System point-of-care device in reliability and clinical use. We found a slope of 0.93 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.79 to 1.14) and an intercept of 0.12 (95% CI, −2.21 to 1.61) for the comparison of ADVIA 2120i and HemoCue WBC system (n = 14), a slope of 1.09 (95% CI, 0.94 to 1.26) and an intercept of −1.08 (95% CI, −2.46 to 0.07) for the comparison of ADVIA 2120i and microscopic WBC count (n = 52), and a slope of 1.00 (95% CI, 0.89 to 1.14) and an intercept of −0.50 (95% CI, −1.51 to 0.34) for the comparison of microscopic WBC count and HemoCue system (n = 40). We can conclude that microscopic WBC count is still a reliable alternative for obtaining the WBC count in primary care practices.