Glucose inhibitor tubes in Croatian laboratories: are we doing well?

Introduction: Reliable and accurate measurement of blood glucose concentration is of crucial importance for making clinical decisions in diagnosis diabetes, gestational diabetes and impaired fasting glucose tolerance.

Materials and methods: Survey was performed in form of questionnaire. Questionnaire was sent to all Croatian laboratories (N = 204) in electronic form using SurveyMonkey cloud-based software (SurveyMonkey, Inc., San Mateo, USA) as an extra-analytical module of the Croatian EQA (External Quality Assessment) provider Croatian center for external quality assessment (CROQALM) in June 2023.

Results: In total 148 (73%) of laboratories responded to the survey. Large proportion of laboratories never use glucose inhibitor tubes for random glucose measurement (more than half) or for glucose function tests (one quarter). Only three laboratories use recommended glycolysis inhibitor citrate. Many other inhibitors are also used, even if some of them are not recommended for plasma glucose measurement. Glucose is almost never (93%) sampled on ice when glucose inhibitor tube is not available.

Conclusions: Laboratories in Croatia do not follow the recommended procedures regarding glycolysis inhibitors for glucose determination.