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Current State of Paediatric Reference Intervals and the Importance of Correctly Describing the Biochemistry of Child Development: A Review

Good paediatric biomarkers are critical for the decision-making process in child healthcare. However, reference intervals used in pediatric care today remain highly inconsistent across a broad range of common clinical biomarkers.  

This review paper assessed biomarker-specific pediatric reference intervals and their clinical utility with respect to the underlying biological changes occurring during development. Authors concluded that although large numbers of pediatric reference intervals are published for some biomarkers, very few are used by clinical and commercial laboratories. The patterns, extent, and timing of biomarker changes are highly variable, particularly during developmental stages with rapid physiologic changes. However, many pediatric reference intervals do not capture these changes and thus do not accurately reflect the underlying biochemistry of development, resulting in significant inconsistencies between reference intervals. 

There is a need to correctly describe the biochemistry of child development as well as to identify strategies to develop accurate and consistent pediatric reference intervals for improved pediatric care. 

Due to the importance of paediatric biomarkers for medicine development for children, EPTRI has created a Thematic Research Platform (TRP) specifically devoted to Paediatric Biomarkers.  

The Paediatric Biomarkers TRP provides different technologies and expertise to promote biomarker’s research in the paediatric setting in order to identify, characterise and validate new biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis and personalised therapy in paediatric diseases, and evaluate the paediatric variability with respect to adult biomarkers. 

The platform also gives access to quality controlled biosamples suitable for research on paediatric biomarkers. 

You can find more information about EPTRI’s Paediatric Biomarkers TRP here.  

To access the full research paper, go here.