Enzyme reference materials: their place in diagnostic enzyrnology

Estimations of the activities of various enzymes in clinical samples are routine tasks for clinical chemists. Most of this work is done by automatic analysis. The reference ranges against which patients' results are interpreted, however, have generally been defined in terms of manual methods and the conditions of a manual method cannot be reproduced in automated systems. This paper describes the possibility of translating the results of enzyme analysis into a common currency through the use of enzyme reference materials as calibrators.