Current strategies for quantification of estrogen in clinical research

Publication date: Available online 18 May 2019Source: The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular BiologyAuthor(s): Nina Denver, Shazia Khan, Natalie Z.M. Homer, Margaret R. MacLean, Ruth AndrewAbstractEstrogens and their bioactive metabolites play key roles in regulating diverse processes in health and disease. In particular, estrogen and estrogenic metabolites have shown both protective and non-protective effects on disease pathobiology, implicating the importance of this steroid pathway in disease diagnostics and monitoring. All estrogens circulate in a wide range of concentrations, which in some patient cohorts can be extremely low. However, elevated levels of E2 are also reported in disease. For example, in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) levels are elevated in men with idiopathic PAH and in postmenopausal women with PAH. Conventional immunoassay techniques have been under scrutiny for some time with their selectivity, accuracy and precision coming into question. Analytical methodologies such as gas and liquid chromatography coupled to single and tandem mass spectrometric approaches (GC-MS, GC-MS/MS, LC-MS and LC-MS/MS) have been developed to quantify endogenous estrogens and in some cases their bioactive metabolites in biological fluids such as urine, serum, plasma and saliva. Liquid-liquid or solid-phase extraction approaches are favoured with derivatization remaining a necessity for lower volumes of sample. The limits of quantitation of individual assays v...
Source: The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology - Category: Biochemistry Source Type: research