Ultrasensitive C-Reactive Protein

C-Reactive Protein (CRP) is an acute marker of inflammatory processes. In case of an acute inflammation the concentration of CRP increases and decreases more quickly than the red cell sedimentation rate. The increase of CRP occurs in a non-specific way in different kinds of tissular aggression, as for example in infectious states, rheumatoid arthritis, myocardium infarct, malignant tumour, etc. Routinely available immunochemical assay methods for CRP have limited sensitivity, and until recently, CRP concentrations below 10 mg/L could not be measured precisely, leading to the wide spread adoption of this value as the upper limit of the health-associated reference range. This is satisfactory for most purposes in general medicine. However, in neonatal pediatric practice, a high sensitive CRP immunoassay shows that health-associated reference values are below 1 – 2 mg/L and that any rise above such values is associated with serious disease, usually bacterial infection. More recently, application of sensitive CRP assays to studies of adult cardiovascular disease has revealed important prognostic relationships between modest increase of CRP and the occurrence, progression, and thrombo-occlusive complications of atherosclerosis. We therefore developed an ultra sensitive CRP assay with a detection limit around 1.0 mg/L and a high measuring range (0 – 150 mg/L CRP).