Carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is considered a useful biochemical marker of regular high alcohol intake. CDT was measured in the sera of 51 alcohol abusers, 20 patients with non-alcoholic liver disease and 30 healthy controls with an alcohol intake of < 30 g/day. The mean CDT levels of these three groups respectively were determined with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC; 4.6 +/- 5.2%; 0.7 +/- 0.2%; 0.7 +/- 0.2%) and with a radioimmunoassay after microcolumn anion-exchange chromatography (MAEC/RIA; 34.2 +/- 26.9 U/l; 16.9 +/- 3.8 U/l; 18.0 +/- 5.7 U/l). CDT levels in patients with severe alcohol abuse (161.6 +/- 96.4 g/day) were significantly higher than in the two other groups under investigation (P < 0.0001). In heavily drinking subjects, the mean daily alcohol intake correlated with aspartate aminotransferase levels (ASAT) but not with the CDT levels determined either with HPLC or MAEC/RIA. With both methods, the CDT levels were slightly higher in patients with an ASAT concentration > 30 U/l, which may indicate an advanced liver damage (P < 0.05). Analysis of receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) plots demonstrated that the diagnostic accuracy of the HPLC method, which determines the relative amount of CDT, was significantly higher than the established MAEC/RIA method, which measures the absolute amount of CDT (area under the ROC curve: 0.95 +/- 0.02 vs 0.73 +/- 0.05; P < 0.0001). At a specificity of > 95%, the sensitivity of CDT determined with HPLC and MAEC/RIA was 80 and 47%, respectively. In addition, HPLC may be a useful and reliable method for the determination of this important biochemical marker, since the HPLC chromatogram is a visible document of the successful isotransferrin separation and measurement.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Enzyme immunoassay for the detection of autoantibodies to nRNP and Sm: a rapid and sensitive alternative to current procedures].

Antinuclear antibodies are of major importance in the diagnosis of inflammatory rheumatic diseases. Sm and nRNP antibodies can be found in sera from patients with systemic lupus erythematosus and mixed connective tissue disease. Usually, these antibodies have been detected with one of the following methods: Ouchterlony immunodiffusion, passive hemagglutination or counterimmunoelectrophoresis (CIE). In this work results obtained by Ouchterlony and CIE techniques were compared with those obtained by ELISA. Purified proteins from cellular extracts (HeLa) were used as antigens for Sm- and nRNP-ELISA: D polypeptide for Sm-ELISA and the 68 kD, A, C, B,B' and D polypeptides for nRNP-ELISA. Compared with the other two techniques, ELISA was less time consuming and showed greater sensitivity. Quantitative titration proved to be of advantage in monitoring the course of the diseases mentioned above.

Autoantibodies↗