J Korean Rheum Assoc.
2006 Mar;13(1):26-32.
What is the Best Method in Measuring Rheumatoid Factors?
- Affiliations
-
- 1Departments of Laboratory Medicine/Diagnostic Immunology, College of Medicine, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. tykim@hanyang.ac.kr
Abstract
OBJECTIVE
Rheumatoid factor (RF) is used as one of the criteria for the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Nephelometers are widely used in laboratories to quantitatively measure RF. In nephelometric ways of measurement, there are endpoint nephelometry and rate nephelometry. BN II System (BN II) (Dade Behring Marburg GmbH, USA) is a well known endpoint nephelometer while IMMAGE System (IMMAGE) (Beckman Coulter, USA) is a well known rate nephelometer. We compared these two automatic nephelometric analyzers to evaluate which method shows the best results.
METHODS
We measured RF (n=195) using the two machines. We evaluated the correlation between BN II and IMMAGE. We compared the results of BN II with those of IMMAGE in terms of interference and clinical usefulness.
RESULTS
The correlation coefficient (r) of RF was 0.9310 (p<0.0001). We could not find any significant interference for BN II with high concentration of triglyceride or bilirubin, but IMMAGE showed significant interferences with high concentrations of triglyceride and bilirubin. The sensitivity and specificity of BN II for the diagnosis of RA were 90.3% and 82.4%. Those of IMMAGE were 86.1% and 74.5%.
CONCLUSION
BN II was enough to satisfy the analytical features and it showed better results than IMMAGE. We expect BN II, the endpoint nephelometer, to be the best equipment in measuring RF for diagnosis of RA.
