Are medical measurements/units pertaining to blood-tests and urine-tests standardized across the globe? Or are they different?
(I thought the metric system was standard in science, but when I was talking to my French friend about a test result from a blood-test in Canada, he asked me to explain which unit it was because he was fairly sure it was different?).
While the measured quantities are the same across border, both names and units can vary.
The main difference is often the unit used for the concentration of each analyte : either mass per volume or mole per volume (eg: glucose 1g/L = 5.5 mmol/L), sometime variation on the unit prefix (eg: haemoglobin 120 g/L = 12 g/dL). It is of course possible to convert a value in another representation: here is a list of normal values (PDF) in different units.
This is mostly a result of differing medical traditions/habits (AMA style guide regarding units, wikipedia on units and reference ranges)
