Background: The study aim was to compare the performance of three different methods used for determining urinary glycosaminoglycans (GAG) levels in spot and 24-h urine samples.
Methods: Performance characteristics were studied for cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC), and manual and automated dimethylmethylene blue (DMB) methods.
Results: For automated DMB method, within-run precisions were 9.10% and 1.98%, and between-day precisions were 13.0% and 5.81% in low- and high-urine pools, respectively. The method was linear up to 100 mg/L of GAG concentration. The detection limit of the method was 0.71 mg/L. Mean recovery was 95.7%.
Conclusions: The automated DMB method was found to give better performance characteristics than cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) and manual DMB methods. It is a fast, cheap, simple and reliable method and can be applied in many diseases in which GAG is used as a screening test.