Clinical Chemistry

This book is a toolkit for teaching a course on the pathophysiology of disease and how the most widely utilized laboratory tests can be used to diagnose these conditions. Tests for the major common diseases are presented by organ system. It is also a study guide for students and trainees as they prepare for their respective board examinations. Each topic includes succinct text focusing on a disease topic along with a set of PowerPoint lecture slides and clinical cases (with answers). The toolkit also contains instructions for preparing the teaching laboratories for the course, a comprehensive list of differential diagnoses for the most frequent clinical chemistry abnormalities, discussion of selected cases taken by pathology residents while on night-call, and quiz questions (with answers). Analytical methodology is not presented unless it is important in understanding the test. This third edition includes updated material on tumor markers, Alzheimer’s disease markers, markers for pre-eclampsia, additional drugs for which therapeutic monitoring is available, and biomarkers for ethanol abuse, among others.

The comprehensive toolkit is the result of more than 40 years of teaching an introductory course in clinical chemistry to second-year medical students at the University of California San Diego. Elements of this book have also been used in teaching UC San Diego clinical laboratory scientist training program students, pharmacy students, clinical chemistry postdoctoral fellows, and pathology residents. This work has been previously published in two editions (2017 and 2021) by the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) Press under the title “Practical Laboratory Diagnosis of Disease: Clinical Chemistry.”