Being a woman involves not only the skill of being flexible in aiding the needs of your children. It also requires a person to sacrifice a lot especially during the time of pregnancy and childbirth. It is a good thing that nowadays, methods have been developed that can help couples in determining if their unborn child is perfectly fine inside his/ her mom's womb.
Urine estrogens are being measured in order to monitor how the unborn child is developing during pregnancy. There is an increase in the 24-h urine output of estrogens since there is an increase primarily of estriol formation. Estrogen has three fractions-- estriol, estradiol and estrone. There is no need to fractionize the components since an overall increase in the total estrogen level provides enough clinical significance.
The Kober reaction is the method being employed in order to determine the total estrogen level of urine. it involves the urine sample being heated in a strong solution of aqueous sulfuric acid which also contains hydroquinone. After heating, the solution is also diluted and then the absorbance of the reddish-brown color produced is then measured using the spectrophotometer in order to determine the concentration of total estrogen.
Significant decrease in urine estrogen output is often due to:
- antibiotics such as ampicillin which reduces bacterial levels in the intestine, causing a diminished hydrolysis of estriol conjugates.
- use of hydrochlorothiazide in the Kober reaction which destroys estrogens during the acid hydrolysis step.
Meprobamate, phenolphthalein and L-dopa all falsely increase the results of the test due to their reaction with the Kober reagent.
Thanks for reading my post! Watch out for the next posts to come!
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Reference:
- Clinical Chemistry: A Fundamental Textbook by Donald F. Calbreath
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