Evaluation of a new enzymatic method for homocysteine measurement

Background and objectives: The increased need in clinical chemistry laboratories for methods of homocysteine determination, in correlation with cardiovascular diseases and nutritional deficient status, has led to the development of different analytical methods; fluorescent immunoenzymatic assays and, recently, new fully automated spectrophotometric methods are commercially available. In this paper, we compared data obtained from a new enzymatic method for homocysteine assay (Carolina Liquid Chemistries), with data obtained from a HPLC reference method and an immunoenzymatic method (Abbott AxSYM immunoassay). Results: The enzymatic method shows a good correlation with both the HPLC (Y = −1.3 + 1.02X; R2 = 0.93) and the immunoenzymatic method (Y = 0.7 + 1.02X; R2 = 0.92), although a bias enhancement was present in some samples. However, the enzymatic method shows a superior analytical feasibility because it needs only common laboratory instruments (UV–visible spectrophotometer) and can be easily adapted to large automatic clinical chemistry analyzers. Moreover, it lowers the laboratory cost of the analysis in comparison to both HPLC and immunoenzymatic methods. Conclusions: The enzymatic Carolina Liquid Chemistries method for homocysteine assay shows acceptable analytical performance and undoubtedly possesses technical and cost advantages.