Hepcidin modulation in human diseases: From research to clinic

Table 2 Recently published methods for hepcidin quantification in biological fluids

Method	Reported normal range in serum (No. of controls)	Intra-assay precision (CV1) (%)	Internal standard	Note	LLOD2	Reference
C-ELISA	29-254 ng/mL (males) 17-286 ng/mL (females) (n = 114)	5-19	n.a.	Also used to quantify hepcidin in urine	5 ng/mL	Ganz[76], 2008
Quantitative SELDI-TOF-MS	9-45 ng/mL (males) 7-15 ng/mL (females) (n = 23)	5.7-11.7	Des-Asp Hepcidin-24 (deletion of aspartate residue at position 25)	Also used to quantify hepcidin in urine	3 ng/mL	Swinkels[77], 2008
Quantitative SELDI-TOF-MS	50 ng/mL (average in females) (n = 24)	8-9	Stable isotope labelled hepcidin (13C/15N phenylalanine at position 9)		10 ng/mL	Ward[79], 2008
Micro-HPLC tandem tandem MS	1-19.5 ng/mL (males) 1-6.5 ng/mL (females) (n = 10)	4.8-21	Stable isotope labelled hepcidin (13C/15N isoleucines at position 6-8)		1 ng/mL	Kobold[78], 2008
Liquid Cromatography tandem MS	n.a.	8.7-12.5	Stable isotope labelled hepcidin (13C/15N glycines at position 12-20)	Only used in urine for the moment	n.a.	Bansal[75], 2008
Hepcidin binding domain based test	39-88 ng/mL (n = 40)	< 5	n.a.	Potential for measuring true biologically active hepcidin (e.g. able to bind ferroportin)	n.r.	De Domenico[1], 2008

n.a.: Not applicable; n.r.: Not reported;

¹Coefficient of variation. CV ranges refer to samples with different hepcidin concentrations. With all methods, variations in repeated assays were higher at the lower hepcidin concentration;

²Lower limit of detection.