Measurement of Total Plasma Homocysteine in Patients with Chronic Renal Failure Using HPLC/FLD

Cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death among patients with chronic renal failure. Many reports have been described that homocysteine is one of the independent risk factor to the occulsive vascular disease. In this study, HPLC/FLD (high performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence detector) technique was used to measure homocysteine level in patients with chronic renal failure and normal control group. The detection limit and recovery of total plasma homocysteine using HPLC/FLD were 98.6±5.8% and 0.2 n㏖/㎖, respectively. The linearity of this method was established in concentration range of 2~50 n㏖/㎖ (correlation coefficient=0.9997). The concentrations of total plasma homocysteine were 6.81 ± 1.54 n㏖/㎖ and 27.28 ± 14.94 n㏖/㎖ in normal control (n=20) and patient group (n=90), respectively (p＜0.05). In this study, the HPLC/FLD method showed high sensitivity and reproducibility for a routine clinical laboratory testing. Moreover determination of homocysteine level in plasma might be useful for a biochemical marker for predicting the cardiovascular diseases and for monitoring of therapeutic effect of lowering homocysteine in patients with chronic renal failure.