Neonatal heel prick

The neonatal heel prick is a blood-collection procedure done on newborns. It consists of making a pinprick puncture in one heel of the newborn to collect their blood. This technique is used frequently as the main way to collect blood from neonates. Other techniques include venous or arterial needle sticks, cord blood sampling, or umbilical line collection. This technique is often used for the Guthrie test, where it is used to soak the blood into pre-printed collection cards known as Guthrie cards.[1][2]

The classical Guthrie test is named after Robert Guthrie, an American bacteriologist and physician who devised it in 1962. The test has been widely used in North America and Europe as one of the core newborn screening tests since the late 1960s. The test was initially a bacterial inhibition assay, but is gradually being replaced in many areas by newer techniques such as tandem mass spectrometry that can detect a wider variety of congenital diseases.

  1. ^ Guthrie Cards Archived 1 December 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Catalyst (ABC1), 29 May 2003.
  2. ^ Julia A. McMillan; Ralph D. Feigin; Catherine DeAngelis; M. Douglas Jones (1 April 2006). Oski's pediatrics: principles & practice. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 162–. ISBN 978-0-7817-3894-1. Retrieved 16 April 2010.
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