Evaluation of the Efficiency of the Urine-MDA Analyzer Compared to TBARS Malondialdehyde Quantitation

Overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) induces malfunctioning of the cell, thus leading to a number of pathological conditions such as oxidative-stress related disorders. A well- defined example of cellular damage is lipid peroxidation. Malondialdehyde (MDA) is a stable by-product of lipid peroxidation which easily combines with thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) giving a fluorescent red derivative that can assayed spectrophotometrically. On the basis that urinary MDA can be a direct indicator of oxidative stress, we measured urinary MDA using recently developed urinary MDA analyzer and TBARS kit respectively, and studied correlations between two methods on 27 healthy volunteers. As a result highly accurate and reproducible results were obtained from the analyzer with the mean concentration of 451.20 ± 3.35 free radical point (FP) equivalent to 43.95 % normalized data. The detected values was correlated to TBARS kit method with the mean value of 6.632 ± 0.956 (36.60% normalized data) and the correlation value shows positive association with medium strength, r = 0.3126. The Urinary MDA analyzer works on same principle with colorimetric detection of MDA using TBARS, however the analyzer has short analysis time and the possible artifactual formation of MDA during heating with colorimetric TBARS method is abrogated. This is the first analyzer introduced that can detect urinary MDA, clinically implying its effectiveness and specificity in screening and monitoring oxidative stress-related diseases.