The current concepts of "normal values" and "clinical reference values" in the clinical laboratory (trials for determining clinical reference values of the Tokai University Hospital).
The purposes of this commentary are 1) to summarize the problems and ambiguities that cause many clinical pathologists to discard the term "normal values"; 2) to describe and define two terms, 'normal values" and "clinical reference values", which are becoming important for clinical interpretation of laboratory data; 3) to describe a new method for estimating clinical reference ranges of blood chemistry laboratory tests performed on selected Tokai University Hospital patients; and 4) to provide a bibliography of articles that have focused attention on the conceptual problems in this field.
D001774:Blood Chemical Analysis; D019411:Clinical Laboratory Techniques / Q000592:standards*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011336:Probability; D012016:Reference Values; D012044:Regression Analysis; D013223:Statistics as Topic