Two high performance liquid chromatographic methods for the determination of alpha-tocopherol in serum compared to isotope dilution-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Two high performance liquid chromatographic methods (HPLC) with isocratic reversed-phase separation are presented for the determination of alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) in serum. In the first method alpha-tocopherol acetate is used as internal standard, detection of absorbance is performed at 284 nm. In the second method tocol is used as internal standard, detection of fluorescence is performed with an excitation wavelength of 292 nm and emission wavelength of 325 nm. Both methods require a liquid-liquid extraction as sample preparation. The results of both HPLC methods have been tested by method comparison for n = 25 serum samples versus an isotope dilution-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (ID-GC-MS) method using alpha-tocopherol-d6 as internal standard. The imprecision within-run was lower than 2.5% for the UV method and lower than 1% for the fluorescence method for both standards and serum pools. The between-run imprecision, obtained for serum pools, was below 5% for the UV method and not higher than 1.5% for the fluorescence method and not higher 1.8% for the ID-GC-MS. Recovery experiments performed by spiking pool sera with alpha-tocopherol showed recoveries between 98.5% and 100.6% for all methods studied. The result of the method comparison was a coefficient of correlation of r = 0.998 for the HPLC method with fluorescence detection to the ID-GC-MS reference method and a coefficient of correlation of r = 0.981 for the HPLC method with UV detection to the ID-GC-MS reference method. Both methods presented are useful for the analysis of alpha-tocopherol in patient samples. If detection of fluorescence is used, imprecision and inaccuracy of the HPLC method are comparable to the ID-GC-MS chosen as reference method.