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Abstract
Total homocysteine content in plasma has been linked to the risk of occlusive vascular disease. Plasma homocysteine is present in multiple forms. Current methods for total plasma homocysteine analysis use reducing agents to convert other homocysteine-related compounds to homocysteine before analysis. Due to the incompleteness of reduction and the possibility of re-oxidation for homocysteine, accurate determination of total plasma homocysteine is not always achievable. In this research, performic acid is used to oxidize homocysteine-related compounds to homocysteic acid. The oxidized samples are separated and analyzed for homocysteic acid by ion-exchange chromatography with post-column ninhydrin derivatization and "spectrometric detection. The evaluation of performic acid oxidation on several homocysteine-related compounds and the feasibility of determining plasma homocysteine as homocysteic acid are studied.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The support of this work by the College of New Jersey through the SOSA grant is gratefully acknowledged. Also, the authors would like to acknowledge Chambers Clinical Laboratories (Trenton, NJ) for providing the post-column derivatization unit and plasma samples used in this research.