News
Discontinuation of the Clinitest for Reducing Substances in Urine and Stool - Technical Bulletin
Monday, April 6, 2020
Effective May 1st, 2020, Laboratory Alliance of Central New York will no longer be able to offer the Clinitest for reducing substances in urine as a reflex test for children less than one year of age or for urine or stool samples in adult patients.
This move is necessitated because the reagent manufacturer discontinued production of the reagent in 2015, and our current supply will expire soon. Testing urine for reducing substances was utilized for decades as a means of testing for galactosemia. This method suffered from poor specificity and has long been supplanted by mandatory newborn screenings in all 50 states which screen for more than 30 inborn errors of metabolism, including galactosemia (GALT deficiency).
Should there be a need to order the reducing substance test on stool, it can still be ordered and performed by our reference laboratory, ARUP Laboratories. Testing by ARUP is performed daily on stool by semi-quantitative colorimetry, and is reported in 1-2 days. There is no alternative testing for urine for adult patients. Please refer to the chart below for comparison of our current (discontinued) method and the alternative method available from ARUP.
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Reducing Substance, Stool (Current) |
Reducing Substances, Fecal (ARUP, New) |
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Order Code: |
RSS |
ARUP code 20373, after 5/18/20 code 3002514
|
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Order Availability: |
Orderable via client interfaces |
Manual miscellaneous request |
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Method: |
Copper Sulfate Reduction |
Semi-quantitative Colorimetry |
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Specimen Requirement: |
Entire collection of stool in urine specimen cup |
5 g stool in unpreserved transport vial (ARUP # 40910) |
|
Stability: |
Refrigerated: 24 hours |
Ambient: unacceptable; Refrigerated: 36 hours; Frozen: 1 week |
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Unacceptable: |
NA |
Diaper, stool w/ barium, media/preservatives |
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Billing Code: |
4010085 |
None, manual billing |
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CPT4 Code: |
84376 |
84376 |
|
Reference Interval: |
Negative |
Negative |