Bringing the lab bench to the field: Point-of-care testing for enhancing health research and stakeholder engagement in rural/remote, indigenous, and resource-limited contexts.

Autor: Madimenos FC; Department of Anthropology, Queens College (CUNY), New York, USA.; New York Consortium of Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP), CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA., Gildner TE; Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA., Eick GN; Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA., Sugiyama LS; Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA., Snodgrass JJ; Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA.; Center for Global Health, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA.; Global Station for Indigenous Studies and Cultural Diversity, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council [Am J Hum Biol] 2022 Nov; Vol. 34 (11), pp. e23808. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Sep 27.
DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.23808
Abstrakt: Point-of-care testing (POCT) allows researchers and health-care providers to bring the lab bench to the field, providing essential health information that can be leveraged to improve health care, accessibility, and understanding across clinical and research settings. Gaps in health service access are most pronounced in what we term RIR settings-rural/remote regions, involving Indigenous peoples, and/or within resource-limited settings. In these contexts, morbidity and mortality from infectious and non-communicable diseases are disproportionately higher due to numerous geographic, economic, political, and sociohistorical factors. Human biologists and global health scholars are well-positioned to contribute on-the-ground-level insights that can serve to minimize global health inequities and POCT has the potential to augment such approaches. While the clinical benefits of POCT include increasing health service access by bringing testing, rapid diagnosis, and treatment to underserved communities with limited pathways to centralized laboratory testing, POCT also provides added benefits to both health-focused researchers and their participants. Through portable, minimally invasive devices, researchers can provide actionable health data to participants by coupling POCT with population-specific health education, discussing results and their implications, creating space for participants to voice concerns, and facilitating linkages to treatment. POCT can also strengthen human biology research by shedding light on questions of evolutionary and biocultural importance. Here, we expand on the epidemiological and research value, as well as practical and ethical challenges of POCT across stakeholders (i.e., participant, community, health researcher, and trainee). Finally, we emphasize the immense opportunities of POCT for fostering collaborative research and enhancing access to health delivery and information and, by extension, helping to mitigate persistent global health inequities.
(© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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