Application of dried blood spots to determine XXXX status in a large nutritional study with unsupervised sampling: the Food4Me project.

@entity1 @entity14282 @entity71047 @entity14951 @entity560
UNASSIGNED: An efficient and robust method to measure @entity560 ( @entity14951 ( @entity14282 ) and @entity71047 in dried blood spots (DBS) has been developed and applied in the pan-European multi-centre, internet-based, personalised nutrition intervention study Food4Me. The method includes calibration with blood containing endogenous @entity14282 , spotted as DBS and corrected for haematocrit content. The methodology was validated following international standards. The performance characteristics did not reach those of the current gold standard liquid chromatography-MS/MS in plasma for all parameters, but were found to be very suitable for status-level determination under field conditions. DBS sample quality was very high, and 3778 measurements of @entity14282 were obtained from 1465 @entity1 . The study centre and the season within the study centre were very good predictors of @entity14282 levels (P<0  001 for each case). Seasonal effects were modelled by fitting a sine function with a minimum @entity14282 level on 20 January and a maximum on 21 July. The seasonal amplitude varied from centre to centre. The largest difference between winter and summer levels was found in Germany and the smallest in Poland. The model was cross-validated to determine the consistency of the predictions and the performance of the DBS method. The Pearson's correlation between the measured values and the predicted values was r 0  65, and the sd of their differences was 21  2 nmol/l. This includes the analytical variation and the biological variation within subjects. Overall, DBS obtained by unsupervised sampling of the @entity1 at home was a viable methodology for obtaining @entity560 status information in a large nutritional study.
