Genetic and environmental influences on the fibrinolytic system: a twin study.

The determination of heritability is a key issue to assess the predictive power of polymorphisms for disease in clinical studies. The aim of this study was to determine the heritability of proteins and activation markers of the fibrinolytic system in a large cohort of healthy twins. Heritability was calculated as 0.

An improved assay for the determination of C-reactive protein.

C-reactive protein as the most important acute phase reactant in clinical use provides information about acute as well as chronic inflammatory processes. This application requires an improvement of traditional assays that have been available to the clinical laboratory regarding lipemic interference, precision especially at the lower end, assay and calibration stability as well. In the present study the improved Olympus turbidimetric assay for the determination of C-reactive protein (CRP) was evaluated on the Olympus AU640 analytical system.