Evaluation of the BD vacutainer rapid serum tube for cardiac marker assays on three instrument platforms

Aim The new BD Vacutainer Rapid Serum Tube (BD RST) contains a thrombin additive, which promotes rapid clotting of the blood. As this may be beneficial when rapid turnaround time is critical, we evaluated the clinical performance of this tube in comparison to the BD Vacutainer SST II Advance Tube (BD SST II Advance ) for selected cardiac markers. Methods Specimens were collected from 43 adult cardiac patients. Following specimen clotting, the tubes were centrifuged to provide separated serum. Serum was tested at initial time (t=0) for cardiac markers on a Beckman Coulter Access 2 (Troponin I, CKMB, myoglobin), Abbott AxSYM (Troponin I, CKMB, myoglobin) and Roche Elecsys 1010 (Troponin T, NT-proBNP), and at 24 hours (t=24) on the Access 2. Results Data were analysed to determine mean biases and 95% limits for BD RST versus BD SST II Advance between-tube comparisons for each marker per instrument at t=0, and within-tube comparisons for each tube for each marker (t=24 versus t=0). All between-tube and within-tube mean biases were considered clinically acceptable. Concordance analysis based on the 99th percentile representing the upper reference limit for troponin demonstrated 97%–100% concordance between the two tube types for all troponin assays.