Performance of “Kits” used for clinical chemical analysis of GOT (aspartate aminotransferase)

Forty-three kits for clinical chemical analysis of GOT (aspartate aminotransferase) were evaluated. The reference method was the kinetic method performed on the Abbott ABA-100 Bichromatic Analyzer. Specific data are tabulated for each kit and include ease and speed of testing and performance data. Most kits failed to provide completely adequate labelling information. Reproducibility CV for the kits varied widely (4.20 to 21.26 for the normal pool and 1.57 to 20.51 for the high pool). Many kits gave significant numbers of false positive and false negative results on patient samples. There is a need for manufacturers to either derive their own normal ranges or to establish exact equivalency values with the method used to establish the normal values. No difference was demonstrated between performance by two skilled technologists. However, we did detect lot-to-lot variation and differences in performance between narrow bandpass and wide bandpass spectrophotometers.