The importance of a specialist viewpoint on blood tests in elderly people and their interpretation was established by Hodkinson. He described the need for full investigation, the choice of suitable reference populations in old age, the difference in reference ranges between older and younger people and the effect of the special features of medicine in old age on appropriate testing strategies. In this journal, Rochman has discussed problems in chemical pathology interpretations in the elderly. This review builds on previous work by looking at recent papers relevant to biochemical and haematological investigations of practical relevance to the clinical medicine of old age. It is based on a Medline search combining sets of papers relating to specific investigations and clinical situations with those using the key word ‘elderly’. Added to these papers are others known to the author and colleagues.