Best Platelet Disorder Research Centers

I'm curious... who is doing the research for diagnosis? For platelet physiology. Is the Mayo Clinic a center of excellence? What universities shine in this area?

Research for diagnosis? I'm not sure what you mean.

A few people here have gone to Mayo. They had a lot of tests done but did not get any further with their ITP.

I can tell you that some of the top ITP experts attend the PDSA conferences and contribute to the Newsletters and research that is reported on this web site.

Thanks, Sandi. What I was getting at is... it seems like there is still much to be done in terms of achieving strong diagnoses for many situations. I would imagine there are researchers figuring out ways to diagnose platelet disorders. So, I'm curious where the good work towards diagnostic techniques is going on.

Diagnosis is fairly easy and is not where the research needs to be. Research is being done in various places looking at the mechanisms of action and how to determine which patient will benefit from which treatments. They only recently discovered that ITP isn't just a disorder of platelet destruction but also one of platelet production and the mechanism of action for that particular part of it has now been described.

The main research centre in the UK is at the Royal London Hospital where an ITP Register of patients has been set up. Every now and then they ask for more blood from us for various tests. The UK Support Association also funds research projects, the most recent completed one being on fatigue, and currently looking at whether food intolerances are involved.

Someone else will know what's happening in the US although of course research isn't totally separate. There is much collaboration between research programmes.

There are lots of papers to read out there. Search the main publications.. Blood is one, and see what comes up. I use google scholar as a search engine and it finds many interesting articles.

A good search engine, used by researchers is pubmed

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed

Type in keywords, authors names, journal names....

Also at the site to the left of the box where you type in keywords, there is a pull down menu, about 2/3s down is "PMC" which is "pubmed central"


If you choose PMC and search there, the search engine will also search the full text of article for your keyword. THus, you get a lot more hits, but this also requires more work to sort through all the selections -

Mark