Evaluation of the Alere D-dimer test for point of care testing

The primary care regularly sees patients that have symptoms that could be due to thromboembolic diseases. It would be valuable to be able to rule out deep venous thrombosis or pulmonary embolism using Wells score and a negative D-dimer testing already at the primary care unit. This requires a validated D-dimer assay suitable for primary care use. We compared D-dimer results obtained with the new point of care analyzer Alere Triage(®) and the central hospital laboratory STA-R Evolution analyzer from the same patient samples (n = 102). We also calculated the total coefficient of variation (CV) for the Alere method. The two methods showed a good linear correlation (R(2) = 0.977) and a slope of 0.975. CV for the Alere D-dimer method was well below 10%. The study shows that the Alere D-dimer assay and the central laboratory standard assay show similar results. We suggest that the Alere D-dimer assay could be used in primary care in combination with Wells score to reduce referrals to the emergency unit.