Weight may affect doctors” ability to correctly interpret routine blood tests in children, according to a new study.
“We performed the first comprehensive analysis of the effect of obesity on routine blood tests in a large community population of children and found that almost 70 percent of the blood tests studied were affected,” said the study author, Victoria Higgins from the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.
“As clinical decisions are often guided by normative ranges based on a large healthy population, understanding how and which routine blood tests are affected by obesity is important to correctly interpret blood test results,” Higgins said.