Accuracy of Leading Cholesterol Tests are Doubtful : Study

Commercial tests to evaluate cholesterol levels were not as accurate as results from well-established techniques, a recent research has revealed.

The National Cholesterol Education Program maintains guidelines to assess the accuracy of methods for measuring cholesterol levels in patients.

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In 2008, there were different commercial homogeneous direct measurement methods for HDL-cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol determination that were distributed worldwide under various trade names.

Despite their advantages, it is doubted if direct lipoprotein cholesterol methods generate equivalent values as older more skill-demanding methods and to the established reference measurement procedures for HDL-C and LDL-C used as the basis for clinical guidelines.

W. Greg Miller of Virginia Commonwealth University and his team evaluated seven commercially available direct measurement reagents for quantifying HDL-C and LDL-C. The team examined 175 patients in all-37 with no known disease and 138 with known cardiovascular disease and other conditions such as dyslipidemia-and compared the results to those obtained by reference measurement procedures.

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They evaluated trueness, accuracy for individual samples, imprecision, and specificity for HDL and LDL lipoproteins, thus providing a comprehensive assessment of the analytical performance of the current direct lipoprotein methods.

"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," research team member Elizabeth T. Leary, Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biomarkers, Inc said.

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"However, all the methods failed to meet the NCEP's goals for diseased individuals, because of compromised specificity toward abnormal proteins," she added.

The study was published in the journal Clinical Chemistry.

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Source-ANI