American journal of hematology
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Comparative Study
Determination of plasma soluble fibrin using a new ELISA method in patients with disseminated intravascular coagulation.
We measured plasma levels of soluble fibrin (SF) in 98 patients suspected of having disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) using a newly developed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and investigated the correlations between SF determinations and measurements of other hemostatic molecular markers to determine the diagnostic usefulness of determinations of SF. Patients were classified into four groups according to their clinical and laboratory findings: overt DIC (n =33), subclinical DIC (n =23) hypercoagulability (n =22), and non-DIC (n =20). SF levels were significantly higher in patients with overt DIC compared with the other three groups and were significantly higher in the subclinical DIC and hypercoagulability groups compared with the non-DIC patients. ⋯ Analysis of receiver-operating characteristic curves showed that the sensitivity and specificity of SF were similar to those of XDP for diagnosis of DIC. The sensitivity and specificity of SF for diagnosis of overt DIC were both above 90% when the cut-off value was set at 65 mu g/ml.plasma levels of SF were also increased in patients with extravascular fibrin formation without DIC. Our findings suggest that measurement of plasma levels of SF by this ELISA method is useful for the diagnosis of DIC and the evaluation of the patient's clinical status.