"In the non-diseased individuals, six of eight HDL-C and five of eight LDL-C direct methods met the National Cholesterol Education Program [guidelines]," said research team member Elizabeth T. Leary, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biomarkers, Inc. "However, all the methods failed to meet the NCEP's goals for diseased individuals, because of compromised specificity toward abnormal proteins."

Dr. Leary continued, "Homogeneous methods suffer from non-specificity in unusual samples, i.e., lipoproteins which are structurally or compositionally altered as in certain diseases (e.g. diabetes), unusual phenotypes or after certain drug treatments. Each homogeneous method is based on a different separation principle and some homogeneous methods may be better than others. As observed in the study, all methods are more variable in diseased samples. The fact is that no method can be 'correct' all of the time including the 'reference methods'. It all depends on the definition of truth. The bottom line is that one needs to know the assays, use them appropriately and interpret the data accordingly."

SOURCE Clinical Chemistry