Comparative Evaluation of High Performance Liquid Chromatography(HPLC) & Fluorescent Polarization Immunoassay(FPIA) Methods in Measuring Blood Concentration of Phenobarbital & Carbamazepine

Therapeutic drug monitoring(TDM) is a very important function of a modern clinical laboratory. Chromatographic techniques have been the gold standard method for quantitative monitoring of drugs from the long time ago. Immunoassay methods are very useful today due to their ability to be installed on automation systems, their high speed and independence from expert personnel. The present study was undertaken to compare high performance liquid chromatography(HPLC) method with fluorescent polarization immunoassay(FPIA) for analysis of carbamazepine(CBZ) and phenobarbital (PHE) level in human blood. Patients & In this cross-sectional research 100 patients on PHE and 103 patients on CBZ regimen admitted to TDM center of Iran Reference Laboratories were sampled. Levels of drug in blood were measured. Data were recorded and then analysed by statistical tests of Pearson correlation coefficent(r), linear regression analysis and T-Test. For PHE and CBZ, r was respectively 0.971 and 0.953, which indicated a good correlation between two methods. Linear analysis of regression and T-Test showed that data sets of FPIA method are a little higher than HPLC. Both HPLC and FPIA may be applied to determine PHE & CBZ in TDM. HPLC can be more useful in special cases who need high precision and TDM related research.