Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

The Automated Blood Count: Its History, Utility and Need for Change

Srdjan Denic^1*, Abdul Kader Souid² and M Gary Nicholls³

¹Department of Medicine, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Abu Dhabi, UAE

²Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Abu Dhabi, UAE

³Department of Medicine, University of Otago-Christchurch, Christchurch, New Zealand

Received Date: Oct 23, 2019 / Accepted Date: Dec 02, 2019 / Published Date: Dec 10, 2019

Citation: Denic S, Souid AK, Nicholls MG (2019) The Automated Blood Count: Its History, Utility and Need for Change. J Community Med Health Educ 9: 671.

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Copyright: © 2019 Denic S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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An automated complete blood cell count (CBC) is one of the most frequently ordered laboratory tests. The clinical utility of its 20 to 25 parameters, however, is variable depending, for example, upon the physician’s age, education and specialty. Likewise, the information value of some CBC indices differs in populations with, for example, a high prevalence of benign (ethnic) neutropenia or thalassemia trait compared with other populations. Whereas modern blood cell analyzers count reticulocytes they do not include this important count in a ‘standard’ CBC report. In this article, we review the history of blood cell counting, the clinical utility of some parameters as well as the logic and information processing costs of their use in clinical practice. We conclude that the CBC as currently reported is an unnecessarily complex yet incomplete test, and suggest that blood analyzers be reprogramed to offer physicians a Short CBC with 11 clinically relevant parameters i.e. red cell count, reticulocyte count, hemoglobin, mean corpuscular volume, red blood cell distribution width, platelet count, and five absolute leukocyte differential counts.

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