Until recently, much of the research in medical literature used primarily male populations. Slowly we've come to appreciate the importance of studying female populations due to the differences in normal physiology as well as disease pathology between men and women.

Women who present with acute coronary events are less frequently to be properly diagnosed and often have worse outcomes than men. Part of the problem may be that women are less apt to manifest increased biomarkers or often receive less aggressive guideline-mandated care. Women also have lower reference values for biomarkers of cardiac injury that are rarely taken into account.

The development of in vitro fertilization in the 1970s has revolutionized the treatment of infertility. The ability to culture embryos has allowed for the development of the preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This involves removing a cell from the developing embryos for genetic testing before choosing one to implant. Just like prenatal diagnosis, it is used to screen for various genetic diseases before birth. For women of advanced maternal age or couples with known genetic mutations, the ability to screen of embryos free of certain genetic mutations is reassuring.

The January 2014 issue of Clinical Chemistry is devoted to the area of women's health. It includes a multi-center report on the application of measuring the circulating products of the proteolytic enzyme carboxypeptidase-N for the early detection of breast cancer. Accompanying that paper was an editorial by Eleftherios Diamandis on the tumor microenvironment and if released peptides could form the basis for early diagnosis breast cancer tests.

This is the January 2014 special Women's Health issue of Clinical Chemistry, Volume 60, Issue 1.

Gestational diabetes mellitus is becoming more common as the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes continues. Newly proposed diagnostic criteria will, if adopted universally, further increase the prevalence of this condition.

In making the diagnosis of diabetes, there are several advantages using determinations of hemoglobin A1c rather than glucose measurements. These include the pre-analytics stability of hemoglobin A1c in the sample, a low within-subject biological variation, as well as being free from the dietary restrictions associated with measuring glucose.

In this new generation of PCR technology, droplet microfluidic systems are used to create and analyze nanoliter to picoliter droplets, which enables simple digital PCR workflows that yield highly sensitive mutation detection within complex DNA mixtures.

Cell free DNA from transplanted organs in the circulation of transplant recipients is a potential biomarker of rejection. But most of these methods entail high costs, long turnaround times and the need for donor DNA.

Multiplex digital PCR can be used for the sensitive detection of circulating tumor DNA with performance unachievable by other current molecular detection approaches.