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Updated: Dec 24, 2025

Cellular Lipid Extraction for Targeted Stable Isotope Dilution Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry Analysis
Published on: November 17, 2011
A method for measuring glycerol-blanked triglyceride concentrations by using gas chromatography-isotope dilution mass
Isao Koyama1, Hironori Imano2, Masakazu Nakamura1
1Lipid Reference Laboratory, Department of Preventive Cardiology, National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center, Osaka, Japan.
Background:
Serum triglyceride concentrations are measured as total glycerides content in many Western countries. In Japan, glycerol-blanked triglycerides (TG-GB) are measured to identify postprandial hypertriglyceridaemia and to minimize the influence of glycerol formulation on serum triglyceride values. However, TG-GB measurements have not been standardized. Therefore, we developed an efficient quantification system for total glycerides and free glycerol that allows the calculation of TG-GB concentrations.
Methods:
We measured total glycerides and free glycerol in human serum by using gas chromatography-isotope dilution mass spectrometry and compared its performance to the reference method of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Results:
Our practical method of total glycerides and free glycerol quantification achieved excellent precision for both within-run and among-run coefficients of variation (<1.5% and <2.7%, respectively), with an average recovery of 99.8% for free glycerol. However, we noted an average %bias of -0.26% for total glycerides and -3.15% for free glycerol between our TG-GB method and the CDC reference method.
Conclusions:
This practical method of total glycerides and free glycerol quantification enables traceability assessment of TG-GB measurements. Differences between the output values of TG-GB and the CDC reference method might result from the differences in free glycerol values.
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