Is it necessary to run a separate body fluid control on a DxH800? We have always just used our 6 C controls and a background count before running a fluid sample. It appears that Beckman Coulter only recommends a daily background done in the body fluid mode.

Due to issues with linearity limits and other inconsistent results, we have chosen to not run body fluids on our Coulter DxHs, but we were given the impression that specific controls are necessary if you are going to report those out.

Scott

Beckman makes specific body fluid controls that get run in body fluid mode, and you should be running those if you are reporting body fluids from the DxH.  As Scott mentioned, the linearity isn't very useful for most of our fluids (we can usually report the TNC, but need to perform a manual RBC).  I'd like to move them to our Iris.

We run 2 levels of body fluid controls every 24 hrs on the Sysmex XNs. It's a control specifically for body fluids as the XN treats body fluids differently than it does peripheral blood specimens. When we had the XE analyzers we did not run a specific QC but we also ran them specimens same way we ran whole blood specimens.