Accuracy of a user-friendly centrifuge for measuring creamatocrits on mothers' milk in the clinical setting.

The creamatocrit (CRCT), a simple, accurate, and inexpensive technique for the estimation of lipid and caloric content in mothers' milk, has been used extensively in lactation research, but has not been integrated into the routine management of clinical lactation problems such as slow weight gain in mothers' milk-fed preterm and term infants. The Creamatocrit Plus is a lightweight, noiseless centrifuge with an embedded reader that automatically calculates lipid and calories from the CRCT value, making it ideal for use in the clinical setting. This study compared intra-user and inter-user reliability, the equivalence of the CRCT values obtained with the Creamatocrit Plus to the two standard techniques for performing CRCTs: the standard laboratory centrifuge with a hematocrit reader and the standard laboratory centrifuge with digital calipers, and the predictive accuracy of the Creamatocrit Plus for estimating the lipid and caloric content in mothers' milk. CRCTs were performed using the three techniques on 36 milk specimens from 12 women. Laboratory analyses of lipid and calories were performed by investigators blinded to CRCT values. The mean absolute intra-user and inter-user differences were all <1% CRCT, and the mean CRCT measures were nearly identical for the three measurement techniques. Linear correlations between CRCT and laboratory measures for lipid (r = 0.95) and calories (r = 0.94) were very high. The authors conclude that the Creamatocrit Plus can replace cumbersome laboratory equipment for measuring CRCTs in the clinical setting.