Abstract
IntroductionWith the trend of increasing incidence of autoimmune diseases, laboratories are faced with exponential growth of the requests for tests relating the diagnosis of these diseases. Unfortunately, the lack of laboratory personnel experienced in this specific discipline of laboratory diagnostic, as well as an unawareness of a method limitation often results in confusion for clinicians. The aim was to gain insight into number and type of Croatian laboratories that perform humoral diagnostics with the final goal to improve and harmonize laboratory diagnostics of autoimmune diseases in Croatia.Materials and methodsIn order to get insight into current laboratory practice two questionnaires, consisting of 42 questions in total, were created. Surveys were conducted using SurveyMonkey application and were sent to 88 medical biochemistry laboratories in Croatia for the first survey. Out of 33 laboratories that declared to perform diagnostic from the scope, 19 were selected for the second survey based on the tests they pleaded to perform. The survey comprised questions regarding autoantibody hallmarks of systemic autoimmune diseases while regarding organ-specific autoimmune diseases was limited to diseases of liver, gastrointestinal and nervous system.ResultsResponse rate was high with 80 / 88 (91%) laboratories which answered the first questionnaire, and 19 / 19 (1.0) for the second questionnaire. Obtained results of surveys indicate high heterogeneity in the performance of autoantibody testing among laboratories in Croatia.ConclusionsResults indicate the need of creating recommendations and algorithms in order to harmonize the approach to laboratory diagnostics of autoimmune diseases in Croatia.
Highlights
With the trend of increasing incidence of autoimmune diseases, laboratories are faced with exponential growth of the requests for tests relating the diagnosis of these diseases
Obtained results of surveys indicate high heterogeneity in the performance of autoantibody testing among laboratories in Croatia
Results indicate the need of creating recommendations and algorithms in order to harmonize the approach to laboratory diagnostics of autoimmune diseases in Croatia
Summary
With the trend of increasing incidence of autoimmune diseases, laboratories are faced with exponential growth of the requests for tests relating the diagnosis of these diseases. For most systemic and organ-specific autoimmune diseases diagnostic criteria or classification criteria have been introduced [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] Autoantibodies included in those criteria are an important tool for diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. This prompted the initiative from Croatian Society of Medical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CSMBLM) to form a Working group (WG) for laboratory diagnostics of autoimmune diseases with following goals: to screen the current practice in performing laboratory medicine of autoimmune diseases in Croatia, to identify the main problems and propose the recommendations that would improve and harmonize laboratory medicine of autoimmune diseases. This study summarises the outcome of these questionnaires and provides the insight into the main problems and sources of heterogeneity in performance of autoantibody testing
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