Reliability of blood alcohol determinations at clinical chemistry laboratories in Sweden.

Known concentrations of ethanol, methanol, isopropanol and its metabolite acetone were added to plasma or whole blood and aliquots of each specimen were sent to clinical chemistry laboratories in Sweden as a declared collaborative study. All participants used gas-liquid chromatography (GC) for quantitative determination of ethanol and other low molecular weight volatiles. The mean within laboratory precision for analysis of ethanol, expressed as coefficient of variation (CV), was 4.