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Retinol concentrations in capillary dried blood spots from healthy volunteers: method validation
1Craft Technologies, Inc, Wilson, NC 27893, USA. ncraft@crafttechnologies.com
Insights
Dried blood spots (DBS) offer a viable alternative for vitamin A assessment, showing comparable retinol levels to serum. This method can improve VAD surveillance and intervention efforts globally.
Area of Science:
- Biochemistry
- Public Health
- Clinical Diagnostics
Background:
- Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) poses a significant global health challenge, particularly in developing nations, causing widespread vision impairment and increased childhood mortality.
- Current methods for VAD assessment face challenges in sample collection and logistics, hindering effective detection and intervention strategies.
- Dried blood spots (DBS) present a promising alternative for simplifying vitamin A status assessment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To validate the use of retinol measurements from dried blood spots (DBS) for assessing vitamin A status.
- To compare DBS retinol concentrations with those obtained from traditional venous and capillary serum samples.
Main Methods:
- Simultaneous collection of venous and capillary blood from 20 healthy adult volunteers.
- Preparation of both DBS and liquid serum from each blood specimen, resulting in 80 total samples.
- Storage of all samples at -70°C prior to High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis.
Main Results:
- Mean retinol concentrations were similar across venous serum, capillary serum, venous DBS, and capillary DBS samples.
- High correlation (R² values ranging from 0.77 to 0.95) was observed between different sample types, indicating good agreement.
- HPLC analysis confirmed the reliability of retinol quantification in DBS.
Conclusions:
- Retinol levels measured in DBS using HPLC are comparable to those in serum.
- DBS retinol measurements can be reliably used for vitamin A assessment, facilitating easier sample collection and analysis.
- This validates the potential for integrating DBS data with existing serum retinol data for improved VAD surveillance and research.
Background:
Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a major public health problem in the developing world, leading to >3 million eye-related problems in preschool children. Nearly 250 million children have subclinical VAD, resulting in a 23% increase in childhood mortality. Difficulties in obtaining samples to assess VAD have hampered the detection, intervention, and surveillance of VAD. The use of dried blood spots (DBS) could ameliorate many problems of vitamin A assessment.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to validate the use of retinol in DBS for vitamin A assessment by comparing it with venous and capillary serum retinol.
Design:
Venous and capillary blood specimens were obtained simultaneously from 20 healthy adult volunteers. From each blood specimen, both DBS and liquid serum were prepared (a total of 80 samples). All specimens were maintained at -70 degrees C until HPLC analysis.
Results:
The mean retinol concentrations in the 4 sample types were as follows: venous serum (2.02 +/- 0.42 micromol/L, or 58 +/- 12 microg/dL), capillary serum (2.06 +/- 0.42 micromol/L, or 59 +/- 12 microg/dL), venous DBS (2.06 +/- 0.49 micromol/L, or 59 +/- 14 microg/dL), and capillary DBS (2.09 +/- 0.45 micromol/L, or 60 +/- 13 microg/dL). Of the 6 possible 2-way combinations, the R(2) values ranged from 0.77 for capillary DBS versus venous DBS to 0.95 for venous serum versus capillary serum.
Conclusions:
DBS retinol measured by HPLC is comparable with serum retinol. Thus, it is possible to compare and combine blood retinol concentration data obtained from DBS with current and historic measurements in serum.
