© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & Association of Clinical Pathologists
EDITORIAL
ANCA testing
Rational requesting or rationing testing?
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Mr R J Lock
North Bristol NHS Trust, Southmead Hospital, Bristol BS10 5NB, UK; boblock75@hotmail.com
The appropriate use of antineutrophil cytoplasm antibody (ANCA) tests
Keywords: antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies; necrotising vasculitis; Wegener’s granulomatosis
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The UK government has acknowledged that up to 70% of medical diagnoses now rely on pathology laboratory analyses.1 One consequence of such reliance is an ever increasing laboratory workload, usually, in National Health Service laboratories, at a rate in excess of the financial resources to support it. It follows that this demand can only be serviced by increased efficiency.
One area where demand has risen sharply in the past decade is in the field of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA) testing. Since the association of ANCA with Wegener’s granulomatosis (WG) in 1985,2 an increasing number of autoimmune, drug induced, and infectious disorders have been shown to have an association with ANCA.3–8 However, overall, the data suggest that these ANCA do not help to elucidate the diagnosis or prognostic features of these disorders (reviewed in Savige et al, 20009). In addition, there is increasing evidence to suggest that
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