engleski

Higher red blood cell distribution width might differentiate primary from secondary polycythemia: A pilot study.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to report that RDW could be used as a rapid tool to differentiate between SP and PV, even in polycythemic patients with normal serum erythropoietin levels. Therefore, careful hematological evaluation for PV should be considered when polycythemic patients present with high RDW. However, this study has several limitations, such as its retrospective design, small number of patients included, and a heterogeneous population of SP patients. In addition, calreticulin mutations have been found in PV on very rare occasions.10, 11 Moreover, different nondriver somatic mutations have been found quite frequently in PV patients using the whole-exome sequencing (ie, ASXL1, DMMT3A, and SFRB1), 12 with some of them also being prognostic (ie, SRSF2).13 Thus, by using this approach, some SP patients in our study could be reclassified as PV patients, even though they did not fulfill the WHO criteria for PV.6 However, advanced genomic techniques are not readily available in everyday clinical practice, especially in resource-limited settings, and the search for the simple, cheap, and an easily obtainable test to differentiate PV from SP is of importance. For this reason, further studies on larger number of patients are needed to validate our results, preferentially in a prospective manner.

chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ; Janus Kinase 2 ; polycythemia ; red cell distribution width ; smoking

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