The Journal of steroid biochemistry and molecular biology
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J. Steroid Biochem. Mol. Biol. · May 2018
ReviewThe art of measuring steroids: Principles and practice of current hormonal steroid analysis.
Steroids are small and highly important structural or signalling molecules in living organisms and their metabolism is complex. Due to the multiplicity of enzymes involved there are many different steroid related disorders. E.g., an individual enzyme defect is rather rare but can share various clinical symptoms and can thus be hardly diagnosed clinically. ⋯ LC-MS is a true high throughput technique and highly suited for detecting complex steroids. GC-MS and LC-MS are not competing but complementary techniques. Since reliable steroid determination requires extremely high expertise in the field of analytics as well as steroid biochemistry, it is recommended that collaborations and networking with highly specialized centers of expertise are developed.