Question: How do you analyse physiological samples and interpret the results obtained from diagnostic tests?

Louisa Lee answered on 20 May 2020:

Thanks for your question! Physiological samples can be different bodily fluids, like blood or urine for example. We can analyse them in the hospital labs, using different machines (some of the machines can do the tests automatically once we tell them to!) that can perform many types of tests to measure the levels of different components inside the fluids. Once we have the results of all the tests, we firstly make sure that those tests are accurate and working correctly (this is very important), then we can compare them to the information we have for the local healthy population, and also look for patterns or big changes. Working like a detective, we look for clues to help us to work out what might be happening.