Experience with an external quality assessment programme for point-of-care-testing (POCT) devices for the determination of blood glucose.

This article describes the preparation and internal and external evaluation of materials, critical issues in the external quality assessment (EQA) of point-of-care testing (POCT) devices for measuring blood glucose. A comparison was made between different materials, both of natural and synthetic origin and with and without stabilisers. The aims were to produce a material which was compatible with as many POCT-devices as possible and so reduce the number of materials sent out in each campaign as well as to optimise the precision and comparability of results between methods and devices.

Determination of theophylline by HPLC and GC-IDMS, the effect of chemically similar xanthine derivatives on the specificity of the method and the possibility of paracetamol as interfering substance.

The aim of this study was to develop and compare high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography coupled with isotope dilution-mass spectrometry (GC-IDMS) methods with a common extraction procedure for the determination of substituted xanthines in biological matrices such as serum and urine. For HPLC both isocratic and gradient methods were evaluated. Difficulties occurred in separation of all 6 xanthines of interest - uric acid, theobromine, theophylline, paraxanthine, caffeine and 1,3-dimethyl-7-(2-hydroxyethyl) xanthine as internal standard.

The measurement of theophylline in human serum or plasma using gas chromatography and isotope dilution-mass spectrometry (GC-IDMS) taking other substituted xanthines into consideration.

A method is described which uses a combination of gas chromatography and isotope dilution-mass spectrometry (GC-IDMS) to determine the concentration of theophylline (1,3-dimethyl xanthine) in human plasma or serum samples. The effects of similar substituted xanthines - namely theobromine (3,7-dimethyl xanthine), paraxanthine (1,7-dimethyl xanthine) 1,3-dimethyl-7-(2-hydroxyethyl) xanthine (internal standard HPLC) and caffeine (1,3,7-trimethyl xanthine) were tested to confirm the specificity of the method. The derivatisation of all xanthines was performed with N-methyl-N-trimethylsilyl trifluroacetamide (MSTFA).