Problems with High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein

[摘要] Last year, Ockene et al. (1) published a report in this journal that made the claim that high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) has a degree of measurement stability that is similar to that of total cholesterol and that this provides further evidence of the potential clinical utility of hs-CRP screening as a novel tool for vascular risk prediction.The key evidence that Ockene et al. (1) present to justify their claim is a histogram showing an almost identical agreement in terms of group classification between first and second measurements for hs-CRP and total cholesterol. This apparent agreement is spurious and is attributable to the way in which Ockene et al. partitioned the hs-CRP data. Although the total cholesterol data in the histogram are divided into quartiles, the hs-CRP data are partitioned into arbitrary intervals that contain ∼15%, 20%, 30%, and 35%, respectively, of the sample.Ockene et al. (1) provide two graphs showing the data for all 113 patients for serial cholesterol and CRP values ranked by mean concentration. These values are different for the two analytes. For cholesterol, the average intraindividual variation is 18.2%, and the intraindividual variation is roughly constant across all the range of data. For CRP, the average intraindividual variation is higher, at 44.2%. It is lowest at low CRP concentrations and then increases as the … [↵][1]aAuthor for correspondence. [1]: #xref-corresp-2-1

[学科分类] 过敏症与临床免疫学