Homocysteine – 36 hours stable at room temperature!

Homocysteine is an independent, influencable risk factor that is associated with a wide range of disorders, e.g. cardiovascular diseases and stroke. Thus, the measurement of homocysteine has become increasingly important for many medical specialties.

Homocysteine testing, however, is not unproblematic. Especially the time between blood sampling and centrifugation is of critical importance. During this period blood cells continuously produce homocysteine and release it into plasma or serum. This process falsely increases homocysteine concentrations up to 10% an hour.

In order to gain reliable homocysteine values it is pivotal to either centrifuge the blood sample “as soon as possible” (within 30 minutes after blood collection) or to put the whole blood sample immediately on crushed ice. This blood handling procedure, however, is often impractical in a surgical or clinical setting.

Blood collection tubes from KABE LABORTECHNIK simplify the preanalytic process enormously. The new homocysteine stabilizer reliably inhibits the release of homocysteine from blood cells and holds its level stable for at least 36 hours at ambient temperature! Immediate centrifugation or storing of blood samples on ice becomes unnecessary!

The new homocysteine stabilizer is available as aspiration principle (Primavette® and KABEVETTE®) as well as vacuum principle (KABEVETTE® Vacuum) from KABE LABORTECHNIK.

Get more information and download the homocysteine brochure.