Blood Gases and Critical Care Testing: Clinical Interpretations and Laboratory Applications 3rd Edition

Blood gas tests are a group of tests that are widely used and essential for the evaluation and management of a patient’s ventilation, oxygenation, and acid-base balance, often in emergent situations, and along with blood gases are other critical care analytes measured on blood: calcium, magnesium, phosphate, and lactate. Blood Gases and Critical Care Testing: Clinical Interpretations and Laboratory Applications, Third Edition, serves as your single most important reference for understanding blood gases and critical care testing and interpretation. 

The third edition of this classic book is a complete revision and provides the fundamentals of blood gas (pH, pCO2, pO2) and other critical care tests (calcium, magnesium, phosphate, and lactate), including the history, the definitions, the physiology, and practical information on sample handling, quality control and reference intervals. Case examples with clear clinical interpretations of critical care tests have been included to all chapters. 

This book will serve as a valuable and convenient resource for clinical laboratory scientists in understanding the physiology and clinical use of these critical care tests and for providing practical guidelines for successful routine testing and quality monitoring of these tests. 

• Provides a step-by-step approach for organizing and evaluating clinical blood gas and critical care test results
• Describes several calculated parameters that are used by clinicians for evaluating a patient’s pulmonary function and oxygenation status and discusses clinical examples of their use
• This new edition includes more detailed information about reference intervals, not only for arterial blood, but for venous blood and umbilical cord blood, and for pH in body fluids
• Covers practical information on sample handling and quality control issues for blood gas testing

Dr. John Toffaletti is a Professor of Pathology at Duke University Medical Center, where since 1979 he has worked in the Clinical Laboratories and now directs the Blood Gas Laboratory, the Clinical Pediatric Laboratory, and several outpatient clinic laboratories. He also serves as Chief of Clinical Chemistry at the Durham VA Medical Center. He earned a BS in Chemistry from the University of Florida–Gainesville, a PhD in Biochemistry from UNC Chapel Hill, and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Chemistry at Hartford Hospital. He has authored and presented extensively on blood gas interpretation, cooximetry, ionized calcium, magnesium, lactate in sepsis, kidney function tests (creatinine, cystatin C, GFR), and viscoelastic testing (ROTEM and TEG). His research interests include sample collection, pre-analytical errors, analytical methods, and the clinical use of these tests.

Dr. Craig R. Rackley specializes in pulmonary disease in Durham, North Carolina, and has over 18 years of experience in the field of medicine. He graduated from Georgetown University of Medicine with his medical degree in 2002 and is affiliated with numerous hospitals in North Carolina, including Duke University Medical Center, USA.