Effective Tuesday, October 22, 2013, there will be changes to the options for human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) and pregnancy testing performed by the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics core clinical laboratory.  These changes do NOT affect pregnancy testing performed as point of care in clinical areas (URINE PREGNANCY, POINT OF CARE, POC7).

The changes are:

• Use of Roche Diagnostics assays for rapid urine and serum pregnancy testing in core laboratory.  These replace testing kits with fixed cutoffs.
• Conversion of serum pregnancy testing to quantitative assay, replacing the current qualitative assay with cutoff of 10 mIU/mL HCG.  Detailed reference ranges with HCG values by week of gestation will be appended to all results.
• Renaming of current quantitative HCG assay to reflect dual use as tumor marker (e.g., neoplasms of germ cells and ovaries) and for pregnancy.  This naming convention corresponds to reference laboratories and many other institutions.

Further details of the changes are in the table below:

Current test name + Epic #	New Epic name	Comment
PREGNANCY SCREEN, QUALITATIVE, URINE (LAB1166)	No change	Rapid turnaround time Qualitative urine pregnancy test (cutoff: 20 mIU/mL)
PREGNANCY SCREEN, QUALITATIVE BLOOD (LAB1148)	HCG – PREGNANCY, SERUM, QUANTITATIVE	Rapid turnaround time Recognizes intact HCG "holo-hormone" found in pregnancy but may not recognize HCG forms in neoplasms.  Not appropriate for use as tumor marker.
HCG, QUANT-SERUM, HUM CHOR GON (LAB142)	HCG – TUMOR MARKER OR PREGNANCY, SERUM, QUANTITATIVE	Slower turnaround time (longer incubation during analysis) Recognizes intact HCG "holo-hormone" produced in pregnancy as well as other forms of HCG that may be found in neoplasms.

Questions should be directed to Matthew Krasowski, MD, PhD, medical director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory (384-9380, matthew-krasowski@uiowa.edu).