Assessment of serum cholesterol by two methods: gas-liquid chromatography on a capillary column and chemical ionization-mass fragmentography with isotopic dilution of [3,4-13C] cholesterol as internal standard.

A gas-liquid chromatographic (GLC) method and an isotopic dilution-mass fragmentographic (ID-MF) procedure using the same capillary chromatographic separation are described for serum cholesterol assay. GLC included silylation and separation on a highly efficient glass capillary column which allowed the separation of cholesterol from cholestanol and the use of epicoprostanol as internal standard. The concentrations were calculated from the areas of the signals and digitalized by a reporting integrator. The reproducibility was 0.5% and the correlation with the ID-MF technique was 0.997. The ID-MF technique was characterized by the use of [3,4-13C] cholesterol as the labelled standard and a chemical ionization mode. The reproducibility was 0.8%.