Medical Biochemistry: Principles and Experiments

Medical Biochemistry was first published in 1986. A good knowledge of biochemical analysis is essential for today's health-care practitioners, who, with their patients, face a widening array of laboratory tests to aid in diagnosis. The requisite biochemical methods and principles are best understood if medical students perform their own experiments, yet most currently available laboratory manuals are intended for general biochemistry courses and lack the clinical orientation that could make them useful in a medical context. John Van Pilsum and Robert Roon have designed this laboratory manual specifically to introduce first-year medical students to clinical methods in biochemistry and to help them understand basic biochemical principles as they are applied top medical practice. Each chapter in Medical Biochemistry is devoted to a basic set of related problems and includes, along with laboratory procedures, a clear and readable introduction, a list of selected references, and questions. All of the experiments call for procedures that are used routinely in most clinical laboratories. The areas covered include: electrophoresis of blood proteins, enzymes as diagnostic indicators, lactate dehydrogenase isozymes, the determination of glucose, blood lipids, experiments with nucleic acids, inheritable diseases and genetic engineering, the use of radioisotopes in clinical biochemistry, glycosylated hemoglobin, steroid hormone formation, immunoelectrophoresis of serum proteins, radioimmunoassay of thyroxine, serum electrolytes and carbon dioxide, and the lecithin-sphingomyelin ratio of amniotic fluid. The contributors, besides Van Pilsum and Roon, include: Marilyn H. Koenst, John D. Lipscomb, James B. Howard, Esther F. Freier, Ivan D. Frantz, Denise M. McGuire, Howard C. Towle, Dennis M. Livingston, Ronald D. Edstrom, Robert P. Changler, Frank Ungar, Maureen A. Scaglia, James F. Koerner, and Charles W. Carr.