New Tool: ANC Calculator

[Marrowforums]

Marrowforums is pleased to announce a new site feature for patients and caregivers: The ANC Calculator.

The ANC Calculator helps you compute your Absolute Neutrophil Count from the results of your "CBC with differential" blood test. CBC is your Complete Blood Count; a differential is an analysis of your white cells. Bone marrow failure disease patients may get a differential test regularly or only occasionally.

Your ANC is an estimate of the number of infection-fighting white cells (neutrophils) in your blood. There are good reasons to know your ANC:

• It's an indicator of your risk of infection.
• It can affect the classification of your disease.
• It can affect your treatment choices.

Why a Calculator is needed

Your ANC is computed from your white cell count and the percentages of different types of white cells in your lab report, using a formula. However, the formula differs from one treatment center to another because the labs they use to analyze your blood have different conventions for names, measurement units, and notation. Unlike other ANC Calculators you may find on the Internet, the Marrowforums ANC Calculator takes these differences into account.

You can learn more about ANC on our Absolute Neutrophil Count page. You can learn more about ANC calculation on our Computing Your ANC page.

We suggest that you ask for copies of your blood counts and we invite you to use the ANC Calculator to determine your ANC each time you have a differential.

We need your help

The ANC Calculator is new and we'd like your feedback so we can evaluate and improve it. Please give us your comments by posting in this thread or contacting us privately by email. We'd like to know how well the Calculator works for you, whether you find it useful, and any "glitches" you encounter.

Although the ANC Calculator can help you learn more about your health, and identify questions to ask your doctor, please remember that tools like this must not be used to make your own diagnostic or treatment decisions or to replace medical consultations.

[Wendy Beltrami]

I'm not crazy about this ANC calculator. It seems more complicated than it needs to be(?)
I usually use http://www.mylan-clozapine.com/ANCCalc.asp
which is greatly simplified although it does "round" the number and is therefore not quite as exact.
I'm pretty savvy with reading a lab report and found myself confused trying to decide which numbers this chart was asking for. Our lab reports have a separate section for Auto differential and Manual differential. I repeatedly tried to fill in the values, thinking that I understood the values that were being requested and continued to get the red "warnings".

Just my two cents!

Wendy B/mom to Grant

[Neil Cuadra]

Thanks for taking a look, Wendy. We know there are more variations in lab reports than we could study in advance, and for privacy reasons we can't go around asking to see everyone's lab reports, so we've had to rely on reports that have already been shared or in some cases asking labs directly.

We didn't run into any lab reports with both auto and manual differentials. If you wouldn't mind sending me a Private Message or email, it would help us to know what the specific labels are on the reports you get.