Calculating reference intervals for laboratory measurements

Statistical Methods in Medical Research

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 93-112

  Wright, Eileen M ^a,b   Royston, Patrick ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE   (United Kingdom)

^b Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health   (United Kingdom)

^c IMPERIAL COLLEGE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANTITHROMBIN III; CHOLESTEROL;

AGE; CARDIOVASCULAR RISK; CHOLESTEROL BLOOD LEVEL; COVARIANCE; HUMAN; LABORATORY TEST; MEDICAL EXAMINATION; MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS; PARAMETER; REFERENCE VALUE; REVIEW; SAMPLE;

ADULT; AGE FACTORS; CHOLESTEROL; CONFIDENCE INTERVALS; FEMALE; HUMANS; LABORATORY TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES; MALE; MIDDLE AGED; REFERENCE VALUES; SAMPLE SIZE; TECHNOLOGY, MEDICAL;

EID: 0032860426     PISSN: 09622802     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/096228099672225506     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Elveback LR, Guillier CL, Keating FR Jr. Health, normality, and the ghost of Gauss. Journal of the American Medical Association 1970; 211: 69-75.
2. Gräsbeck R, Saris N-E. Establishment and use of normal values. Scandinavian Journal of Clinical Laboratory Investigations 1969; 24(suppl. 110): 77-90.
3. Pryce JD. Level of haemoglobin in whole blood and red blood-cells, and proposed convention for defining normality. Lancet 1960; 2: 333-36.
4. Elveback LR. How high is high? A proposed alternative to the normal range. Mayo Clinic Proceedings 1972; 47: 93-97.
5. Solberg HE. Subject-based reference values. Scandinavian Journal of Clinical Laboratory Investigations Supplement 1995; 55: 7-10.
6. Solberg HE, Gräsbeck R. Reference values. Advances in Clinical Chemistry 1989; 27: 1-79.
7. Harris EK, Boyd JC. Statistical bases of reference values in laboratory medicine, Vol 146 of Statistics: textbooks and monographs. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1995.
8. Royston P. Calculation of unconditional and conditional reference intervals for fetal size and growth from longitudinal measurements. Statistics in Medicine 1995; 14: 1417-36.
9. Pan HQ, Goldstein H. Multi-level models for longitudinal growth norms. Statistics in Medicine 1998; 16: 2665-78.
10. Fatti LP, Senaoana EM, Thompson ML. Bayesian updating in reference centile charts. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 1998; 161: 103-15.
11. Parzen E. Nonparametric statistical data modeling. Journal of the American Statistical Association 1979; 74: 105-31.
12. Harrell FE, Davis CE. A new distribution-free quantile estimator. Biometrika 1982; 69: 635-40.
13. Sheather SJ, Marron JS. Kernel quantile estimator. Journal of the American Statistical Association 1990; 85: 410-16.
14. Horn PS, Pesce AJ, Copeland BE. A robust approach to reference interval estimation and evaluation Clinical Chemistry 1998; 44: 622-31.
15. Efron B. Bootstrap methods: another look at the jackknife. Annals of Statistics 1979; 7: 1-26.
16. Harris EK, De Mets DL. Estimation of normal ranges and cumulative proportions by transforming observed distributions to Gaussian form. Clinical Chemistry 1972; 18: 605-12.
17. Boyd JC, Lacher DA. The multivariate reference range: an alternative interpretation of multi-test profiles. Clinical Chemistry 1982; 28: 259-65.
18. Box GEP, Cox DR. An analysis of transformations. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 1964; 26: 211-52.
19. Manly BFJ. Exponential data transformations. Statistician 1976; 25: 37-42.
20. Royston P. Parametric models for estimating reference intervals in medicine. Technical report of the statistics section, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College, TR-96-07, 1996.
21. Johnson NL. Systems of frequency curves generated by methods of translation. Biometrika 1949; 36: 149-76.
22. John JA, Draper NR. An alternative family of transformations. Applied Statistics 1980; 29: 190-97.
23. Boyd JC, Lacher DA. A multi-stage Gaussian transformation algorithm for clinical laboratory data. Clinical Chemistry 1982; 28: 1735-41.
24. International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC) Panel on Theory of Reference Values, The theory of reference values. Part 5. Statistical treatment of collected reference values. Determination of reference limits. Journal of Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Biochemistry 1987; 25: 645-56.
25. Tait RC, Walker ID, Islam SIAM, McCall F, Conkie JA, Mitchell R. Influence of demographic factors on antithrombin III activity in a healthy population. British Journal of Haematology 1993; 84: 476-80.
26. Winkel P, Lyngbye J, Jörgensen K. The normal region: a multivariate problem. Scandinavian Journal of Clinical Laboratory Investigations 1972; 30: 339-44.
27. Grams RR, Johnson EA, Benson ES. Laboratory data analysis system: Section III -multivariate normality. American Journal of Clinical Pathology 1972; 58: 188-200.
28. Solberg HE. Multivariate reference regions. Scandinavian Journal of Clinical Laboratory Investigations Supplement 1995; 55: 3-5.
29. Sinton TJ, Cowley DM, Bryant SJ. Reference intervals for calcium, phosphate, and alkaline phosphatase as derived on the basis of multichannel-analyzer profiles. Clinical Chemistry 1986; 32: 76-79.
30. Harris EK, Boyd JC. On dividing reference data into subgroups to produce separate reference ranges. Clinical Chemistry 1990; 36: 265-70.
31. Healy MJR, Rasbash J, Yang M. Distribution-free estimation of age-related centiles. Annals of Human Biology 1988; 15: 17-22.
32. Rossiter JE. Calculating centile curves using kernel density estimation methods with application to infant kidney lengths. Statistics in Medicine 1991; 10: 1693-701.
33. Royston P, Altman DG. Regression using fractional polynomials of continuous covariates: parsimonious parametric modelling. Applied Statistics 1994; 43: 429-67.
34. Royston P, Wright EM. A method for estimating age-specific reference intervals ('normal ranges') based on fractional polynomials and exponential transformation. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 1998; 161: 79-101.
35. Virtanen A, Kairisto V, Irjala K, Rajamaki A, Uusipaikka E. Regression-based reference limits and their reliability: example on hemoglobin during the first year of life. Clinical Chemistry 1998; 44: 327-35.
36. Eubank RL. Spline smoothing and nonparametric regression. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1988.
37. Altman DG. Construction of age-related reference centiles using absolute residuals. Statistics in Medicine 1993; 12: 917-24.
38. Carroll RJ, Ruppert D. Transformation and weighting in regression. London: Chapman & Hall, 1988.
39. Wright E, Royston P. Age-specific reference intervals for normally distributed data. Stata Technical Bulletin 1997; 38: 4-9.
40. Wright E, Royston P. Age-specific reference intervals ('normal ranges'). Stata Technical Bulletin 1996; 34: 24-34.
41. Cole TJ. Fitting smoothed centile curves to reference data (with discussion). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 1988; 151: 385-418.
42. Cole TJ, Green PJ. Smoothing reference centile curves: the LMS method and penalised likelihood. Statistics in Medicine 1992; 11: 1305-19.
43. Cole TJ, Freeman JV, Preece MA. British 1990 growth reference centiles for weight, height, body mass index and head circumference fitted by maximum penalized likelihood. Statistics in Medicine 1998; 17: 407-29.
44. P. Royston, Constructing time-specific reference ranges. Statistics in Medicine 1991; 10: 675-90
45. Mann JI, Lewis B, Shepherd J, Winder AF, Fenster S, Rose L, Morgan B. Blood lipid concentrations and other cardiovascular risk factors: distribution, prevalence and detection in Britain. British Medical Journal 1988; 296: 1702-706.
46. Solberg HE. Statistical treatment of reference values in laboratory medicine: testing the goodness-of-fit of an observed distribution to the Gaussian distribution. Scandinavian Journal of Clinical Laboratory Investigations 1986; 46(suppl. 184): 125-32.
47. Linnet K. Two-stage transformation systems for normalization of reference distributions evaluated. Clinical Chemistry 1987; 33: 381-86.
48. Wright EM, Royston P. A comparison of statistical methods for age-related reference intervals. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 1997; 160: 47-69.
49. Wright EM, Royston P. Assessing the goodness-of-fit of models estimating age-specific reference intervals. Good statistical practice, series, Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, 1997.
50. Henry RJ, Reed AH. Normal values. Clinical chemistry: principles and techniques, 2nd edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1974: 343-71.
51. Virtanen A, Kairisto V, Uusipaikka E. Regression-based reference limits: determination of sufficient sample size. Clinical Chemistry 1998; 44: 2353-58.
52. Solberg HE. RefVal: a program implementing IFCC's recommendations on the statistical treatment of reference values. Department of Clinical Chemistry, Rikshospitalet, Oslo, Norway, 1995.
53. Rasbash J, Pan H, Goldstein H. GROSTAT: a program for estimating age related centiles using piecewise polynomials. Institutes of Education and Child Health, University of London, 1996.
54. Pan HQ, Goldstein H, Yang Q. Nonparametric estimation of age-related centiles over wide age ranges. Annals of Human Biology 1990; 17: 475-81.
55. Wright EM, Royston P. Two methods for assessing the goodness-of-fit of age-specific reference intervals. Stata Technical Bulletin 1999; 47: 8-15.