Korean J Lab Med.  2006 Aug;26(4):282-286. 10.3343/kjlm.2006.28.4.282.

Comparison of 3 Automated Immunoassays for Hepatitis B Surface Antigen

• Yoo SJ
• Oh HJ
• Shin BM

• KMID: 2238836
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3343/kjlm.2006.28.4.282

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) is one of the most important serological markers used to diagnose hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. Automated immunoassays have been developed, meeting the current clinical requirement of HBsAg assays over the years. This study was performed to determine the degree of agreements between 3 kinds of HBsAg assay systems.
METHODS
Serum samples from 425 patients were assayed by the HBsAg assay systems of Elecsys (Roche Diagnostics, Germany), ADVIA Centaur (Bayer Diagnostics, USA), and AxSYM (Abbott Laboratories, USA).
RESULTS
The concordance rates among the 3 assays were 100%. A total of 249 (58.6%) specimens were positive, and their index values showed a weak correlation between the 3 assays; nevertheless, positive specimens with low levels (<10) of index values in one system also presented low values in other systems, and all of them were confirmed by neutralization assays.
CONCLUSIONS
The 3 automated HBsAg assay systems presented a high level of concordance.

Keyword

Hepatitis B virus; HBsAg; Automated immunoassay

MeSH Terms

Hepatitis B Surface Antigens*
Hepatitis B virus
Hepatitis B*
Hepatitis*
Humans
Immunoassay*
Hepatitis B Surface Antigens

Figure

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  Fig. 1. Index values of negative samples for HBsAg assays. Elecsys and Centaur use a cut off <1.0 and AxSYM use <2.0 for negatives. Plot indicates the median, 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentiles as lines, vertical boxes and error bars.

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  Fig. 2. Distributions for positive HBsAg results (n=249). For the calculation of Spearman correlation coefficients, 196 samples with the index value of more than 1,000 with Centaur were excluded. (A) Elecsy vs AxSYM (R=0.44), (B) AxSYM vs Centaur (R=0.76), (C) Elecys vs Centaur (R=0.71).

Reference

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