title: 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).
abstract: 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.
mesh_terms: 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