Direct determination of total serum cholesterol by on-column gas-liquid chromatographic analysis without previous derivatisation compared with WHO-CDC reference method.

A method for the direct determination of total serum cholesterol by on-column gas-liquid chromatography is described. The French reference method developed by Gambert et al. served as a model for our method, which is fast and less laborious than the well-known CDC reference method of Cooper et al. based on the Abell-Kendall technique. The accuracy and precision of our on-column gas-liquid chromatographic method and the CDC reference method are comparable. The obvious advantage of this proposed gas-liquid chromatographic reference method is its increased analytical speed. The problem of the specificity of our method in relation to cholestanol is discussed.