New quantitative enzyme immunoassays for degradation products of fibrin and fibrinogen in plasma: A comparison with other laboratory methods

Abstract

Summary The traditional assays for measuring fibrin/ogen degradation products (FDP) have limitations due to the use of serum, and do not discriminate between FDPs deriving from fibrin or fibrinogen. The crosslinked fibrin derivatives may be detected by means of monoclonal based assays in plasma (D-dimer tests, both ELISA or latex). More recently, new quantitative immunoassays have been proposed and are now available for clinical and laboratory use. The Fibrinostika System kits allow separate and specific determination on plasma samples of degradation products derived from fibrin (FbDP), from fibrinogen (FgDP) and the total amount of FbDP plus FgDP (TDP). The within- and between-assays reproducibility showed acceptable CV% values. The FbDP and FgDP sums correlated well with TDP test values; evaluation of the total degradation products can thus be achieved by either the two separate tests or the global one. The FbDP test showed more frequently higher than normal results in appropriate clinical conditions than the D-dimer test (both ELISA or latex). Furthermore, we observed important discrepancies between the levels of plasma TDP and serum FDP, as the latter often failed to detect fibrin/ogen derivatives measurable with the plasma method. This finding confirms that the serum FDP assays may be affected by technical problems and may therefore lead to unreliable results. The Fibrinostika System tests are reproducible and easy to perform and have a short time-to-result; they seem, therefore, to be useful tools in the clinical coagulation laboratory.