StevenB

Good Morning Malcolm,

My boss asked me an interesting question yesterday and I wanted to pick your brain about it.  The question was, once an anti-M is determined to be clinically insignificant, is there a need to prove that again in future samples?

I told her that I believe it was.  In my experience, I've learned that what may apply to one patient does not mean that another patient would not react differently.  So... just because an anti-M is determined to be insignificant at a certain point in time, does not mean it there isn't a possibility of it converting in the future to a significant antibody and this could vary from patient to patient. Basically, I'm on the side of not making an assumption.

This resulted in my pondering what other labs are doing and it is difficult to find specific info regarding this scenario.   There is plenty of articles on determining the clinical significance of anti-M, but not on the frequency of doing so for previously identified insignificant anti-M.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to see how this was treated under your guidance.

Steve