Abstract
Authors describe state-of-the-art in the routine laboratory diagnostics of cardiovascular risk with special emphasis on metrology, traceability, external quality assessment, biological variation, and reference change value. While analytical quality of total cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, and HbA1cis satisfactory, improvements are needed for HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, apolipoprotein A1, apolipoprotein B, Lp(a), and LpPLA2 measurements.
Biological variation is a strong player in the lipid diagnostics, because reference change value is above 20 % for majority of biomarkers. Current methodology for the measurement of remnant cholesterol is far from optimum and standardization is therefore needed.