How to read a Spanish blood test report in English

What does a Spanish blood test report actually say?

Longetic keeps a Spanish analítica as the laboratory issued it, with the Spanish term, the unit and the reference interval printed on the page. That matters because Spain names several common tests differently from the United Kingdom and the United States. A hemograma is a complete blood count, GOT and GPT are AST and ALT, and VSG is the erythrocyte sedimentation rate.

There is no international standard for what a laboratory calls a test on the page it hands you. The same blood draw produces one set of words in Madrid and another in Manchester, and the words are not translations of each other so much as different naming traditions that happen to describe the same measurement. The table below pairs the terms a Spanish report prints with the terms the English-language patient sources use, with the official page for each side.

Each pair above comes from the matching Spanish and English pages of MedlinePlus, the United States National Library of Medicine's patient service, which publishes both language versions of the same test page and dates each one.

Why searching GOT or GPT does not find the official explanation?

MedlinePlus en español publishes a page for each of these enzymes, but it indexes them under AST and ALT. The ALT page lists GPT among its alternative names, while the AST page lists TGOS and SGOT and does not print the bare abbreviation GOT. So one of the two abbreviations on a Spanish report leads to the official page and the other does not.

This is a small thing that wastes a lot of time. The MedlinePlus page for ALT carries the line "Otros nombres: Alanina transaminasa (ALT), SGPT, glutamato piruvato transaminasa en suero, GPT", so a reader who types GPT lands on it. The page for AST carries "Otros nombres: prueba de TGOS, prueba de transaminasa glutámica-oxaloacética en suero" and never prints GOT on its own. Both pages were last updated on 5 November 2024.

For the equivalence itself, the clearest institutional statement we found is in the medical dictionary of the Clínica Universidad de Navarra, which says "AST y ALT son las siglas del nombre sistemático actual, aspartato aminotransferasa y alanina aminotransferasa." That page carries no review date, which is worth knowing before you lean on it.

Do the units on a Spanish report match a UK or US one?

The same test can be printed in different units on either side of the border. An English NHS trust page states that HbA1c results are expressed as mmol/mol, while the United States institute that publishes patient guidance on the same test reports it as a % value. No official page we read says outright that units differ by country, so this is shown by the two sources, not claimed by one.

South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust prints "HbA1c results are expressed as mmol/mol." and never mentions the other unit. The page was published on 15/12/2021 and last updated on 17/05/2024. On the other side, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases describes the same result as a % value and does not mention mmol/mol at all. Its page states "Last Reviewed April 2018", so it is now eight years old, and that is worth saying out loud rather than leaving for the reader to discover.

Neither page is wrong. They are two national conventions printed without reference to each other, which is exactly the situation a person holding both reports is in. We have written separately about why unit conversion matters in health care, and that piece covers the general case rather than the Spanish one.

Which reference range applies to a Spanish result?

The range printed beside a result belongs to the laboratory that ran it. MedlinePlus tells readers to check the reference range on their own report and says results from different laboratories cannot be compared. An NHS page says normal ranges are a guide and can vary between hospital laboratories, and a Manchester laboratory page says its intervals come partly from the assay manufacturer and are then verified locally.

The English MedlinePlus guidance on understanding your lab results, last updated on 4 September 2025, is blunt about this. It says "You can't compare test results from different labs." and "If you're looking for trends in your test results over time, it's important to try to use the same lab for testing." The Spanish version of the same page tells the reader "debe revisar el rango de referencia que aparece en su reporte de laboratorio."

On the British side, the NHS page on the red blood count says "The normal ranges are a guide and can vary between different hospital laboratories." That page was last reviewed on 06 July 2022 with a next review due on 06 July 2025, so its own review date has passed. For where the numbers come from, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust says its haematology intervals are drawn from published papers and from "reference intervals provided by the instrument/assay manufacturer", and that they "have been verified based on the local adult and paediatric population." A biochemistry handbook from East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust puts it in one line: "Reference ranges vary from Hospital to Hospital."

The practical consequence for someone with reports from two countries is narrow and specific: the interval printed on the Spanish page is the only one that applies to the Spanish number. Reading that number against a British range, or against a range you found online, compares two things that were never calibrated together.

What should you keep with a Spanish result so another doctor can read it?

Keep the laboratory's name, the date of the draw, the unit exactly as printed, the reference interval exactly as printed, and the original file. Those details are what let a doctor in another country read the number rather than guess at it. No NHS page we checked tells a patient what to do with a result obtained abroad, so nothing official fills this gap for you.

That last point deserves stating plainly, because it is a gap rather than a rule. We checked the NHS pages on registering with a GP surgery and both pages on viewing test results. None of them says anything about a clinical result obtained in another country. That is what those pages say today, and it is not evidence about what a GP will or will not do with your report.

What the NHS does publish is what you will not see in your own record. The page on viewing your test results, last reviewed on 27 February 2024, lists "hospital test results that have been sent to your GP surgery" among the things you can see, under a heading that reads "Results you will not see" for those that have not been sent. The NHS App help page on test results, last reviewed on 13 January 2026, lists "you had it done privately" among the reasons a result is missing, and states "It is not possible to download your test results from the NHS App."

What happens when you put a Spanish report into a health app?

Health apps differ most in two places: whether they read a document that is not in English, and whether they keep the laboratory's own reference interval or substitute one. Some vendors publish a language list, some publish nothing at all. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the honest entry is not published, because an unanswered question is not the same as a no.

As a disclosure, Longetic is our product, so weigh this accordingly. On the language question Guava Health publishes more than we do, and that is the honest reading of the table below rather than a caveat buried under it.

Two rows need their own sentence. Longetic publishes that it reads the values out of a report and "files them into your history with the date and the laboratory reference range as the report stated them", and that "If a document is in a layout or language Longetic cannot read, it stays in your record as a file, so nothing is lost", which is a limit rather than a feature. Guava Health publishes that it "can read and extract medical information from PDFs and images in any major language". And Apple's own feature availability page lists Health Records for Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, so Spain is not on that list at all. If you want the wider comparison rather than this one question, we keep a separate piece on apps that track blood test results over time.

Where does a Spanish result live if the clinic was private?

Spain stores clinical information in the regional health services, and the Ministry of Health states that it keeps no clinical reports itself. Each of the four regional portals we read describes its contents as care received inside that region's public system. None of them mentions private centres, and none publishes a route by which a private result would appear there.

The Ministerio de Sanidad states "El almacenamiento de su información clínica se efectúa en los Servicios de Salud autonómicos del SNS." and, in the same place, "El Ministerio de Sanidad no guarda informes clínicos." Laboratory results are a named document type in the national scheme: the ministry's document list includes "Informe de Resultados de pruebas de laboratorio". What varies is the region.

Catalonia's Canal Salut page, updated on 26.05.2023, lists "Consulta i descàrrega d'informes clínics, diagnòstics i resultats d'anàlisis i proves." Madrid's Mi Carpeta de Salud page, updated on 14 May 2026, names "Pruebas de laboratorio en Atención Primaria (últimos 2 años) y Atención Hospitalaria." Andalusia's ClicSalud+ says its contents include "resultados de analíticas" and that you can download them "como documentos separados en formato PDF", while warning that "La información contenida en ClicSalud+ es un resumen". Valencia's Historia de Salud Electrónica offers "Consultar los informes clínicos, guardarlos e imprimirlos." and does not name laboratory results at all.

Private providers publish their own routes. Sanitas tells patients to "Pulsa sobre el icono de la derecha si quieres descargar el informe en formato pdf", with the exception that "Las pruebas diagnósticas en imagen no se pueden descargar." Quirónsalud says "Podrás descargar todo tu historial clínico aunque esté en diferentes hospitales." Eurofins Megalab offers "Descarga de informes online." None of the three pages read publishes an English-language version of the report.

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