Pauline Schuitema: Lipemic Index May Help Identify Severe Lipid Disorders
Pauline Schuitema, PhD Candidate – Department of Vascular Medicine at UMC Utrecht, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article she and her colleagues co-authered, published in Clinica Chimica Acta, adding:
“Happy to share that our study on the clinical utility of the lipemic index (L-index) has been published in Clinica Chimica Acta!
The L-index is a measurement that is automatically generated during routine blood testing to detect whether a sample is unusually cloudy due to lipids.
It is normally used by the laboratory for quality control, but we wondered whether this routinely available measurement could also help identify patients with clinically relevant lipid disorders.
We studied more than 71,000 patients undergoing routine blood testing at UMC Utrecht.
An elevated L-index was uncommon, occurring in only 0.8% of all tested patients.
However, among patients with an elevated L-index and dyslipidemia, around 1 in 3 met screening criteria for a severe triglyceride-rich lipoprotein disorder, including severe hypertriglyceridemia (more than 10 mmol/L) and possible familial dysbetalipoproteinemia.
Importantly, more than two-thirds of these patients were not receiving lipid-lowering treatment.
What makes this particularly relevant for clinical practice is that the L-index is already measured automatically and comes at no additional analytical cost.
Rather than being only a technical laboratory signal, an elevated value could therefore provide an opportunity to identify patients who may benefit from further lipid evaluation and potentially earlier treatment.
Many thanks to all co-authors and to everyone from the UMC Utrecht Central Diagnostic Laboratory who contributed to this project.”
Title: Clinical utility of the lipemic index for identifying severe triglyceride-rich lipoprotein disorders in adults undergoing routine blood testing
Authors: Pauline C.E. Schuitema, Hans Kemperman, Simone Smits, Cornelis A. Koekman, Wouter W. van Solinge, Raymond M. Schiffelers, A. David Marais, Frank L.J. Visseren, Charlotte Koopal
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