The Hormone Laboratory celebrates 60 years!
The Hormone Laboratory at Haukeland University Hospital is the nation’s oldest special laboratory for hormone
analyses in Norway. According to University of Bergen’s history (Volume 2, Torstein I. Bertelsen, “The establishing
of the faculty and the academic field of medicine”, pp 287-288), the Hormone Laboratory was established in 1954
at The Women’s Hospital, Haukeland University Hospital, with Karl F. Støa as head. In a separate transcript written
by Nils Norman in connection with the 32nd anniversary for the Hormone Laboratory at Aker University Hospital,
there was a reference to a note by Jørgen Herman Vogt, which described the establishment of a hormone laboratory
at Haukeland University Hospital in 1952 (communicated by Ole Myking and Thor Thorsen). Thus, we decided to
celebrate the Hormone Laboratory’s 60th anniversary in 2013.
The section currently has 46 employees, where about half are working on managing routine operations, whereas the
other half is working on research. Every year approximately 600 000 hormone analyses are performed, and of these
approximately 300 000 samples are analyzed at the core laboratory under Laboratory for Clinical Biochemistry
(TSH, free T4 and hCG), but the Hormone Laboratory has the medical responsibility for all hormone analyses. In
the latter years we have also used a lot of resources on quality and accreditation, and our goal is to become accredited
at Norsk Akkreditering (NA) within a few years.
Our research activity is first and foremost related to obesity, breast cancer and endocrine treatment as well as analyses
of steroids on LC-MS/MS. We are especially interested in identifying biomarkers which may predict disease and treatment response.
On November 13th we celebrated our 60th anniversary on the 2. floor of the Laboratory Building. This was a very
nice event with great speeches and good food. The Hormone Laboratory is a vigorous and upstanding sixty year-old
facing many new and exciting challenges and opportunities for development.