New Automated Immunoassay allows Laboratories to Manage Increasing Vitamin D Workloads

As the Chief Medical Officers highlight the growing prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in the UK, and stress the need for dietary supplementation in certain at risk groups, laboratories in all parts of the country are now using the new, fully automated Roche Elecsys® Vitamin D Total assay to cope with their increasing vitamin D testing workloads.

The Coventry and Warwickshire Pathology Services has seen an exponential increase in the number of vitamin D status test requests in the last 5 years. “We now perform about 550 vitamin D total assays every week,” commented Claudia Tomkins, Senior Clinical Biochemist at the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. “Consolidation of the Elecsys® Vitamin D Total assay onto our main Roche track system has meant that the analysis is now fully automated. ”

The Elecsys® Vitamin D Total assay has also helped The Doctors Laboratory (TDL) Whitfield Street Laboratory in London to deal with extremely high workloads of around 3000 vitamin D assays per week. “We were looking for a precise and reliable assay that is economical to run and correlates well with the ‘gold standard’ LC-MS/MS method,” commented Dayan Lloyd-Hennie, Joint Head of Chemistry/Autolab.

Kingston Hospital has offered a vitamin D testing service for three years and currently performs over 300 assays every week. “Our workload has tripled in the last two years,” commented Principal BMS, William Ellis.

“Initially, samples were sent away to a referral laboratory for vitamin D testing but when our workload escalated, we decided to bring the assay in-house in order to achieve savings and to improve turnaround times. ”

The Elecsys® Vitamin D Total assay is available for both Roche MODULAR and cobas analytical platforms. It detects the 25(OH) metabolite of both vitamin D2 and vitamin D3 in serum or plasma, ensuring an accurate indication of vitamin D status. This assay has been standardised against the LC-MS/MS reference method (traceable to National Institute of Technology [NIST]) and demonstrates excellent functional sensitivity (<5 ng/mL) and superior precision, particularly at lower levels, making it ideal for effective patient management.