Electrophoretic Determination of Formaldehyde in Human Urine: Application to Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

The primary clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is mainly based on medical history and neuropsychiatric inventory. It is urgent to seek biological indicators with better sensitivity and higher specificity to clinically diagnose and evaluate Alzheimer’s disease. In this work, an electrophoretic method based on 2-thiobarbituric acid derivatization and amperometric detection was developed to determine formaldehyde as a urinary biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease. Under the optimum conditions, the formaldehyde derivative was well separated from the coexisting interferences in urine sample. The limit of detection for formaldehyde was 80.0 nM (2.4 ng/ mL) based on an electrophoretic stacking technology. The average recovery values were in the range of 91.7–110%, and the relative standard deviation values were less than 4.1%. This method has been applied to analyze human urine samples from healthy volunteers and patients with different degrees of Alzheimer’s disease. The assay results showed that the content of urinary formaldehyde in patients suffering Alzheimer’s disease was significantly higher than that in healthy subjects (P < 0.01), suggesting that urinary formaldehyde may be speculated to be an auxiliary noninvasive biomarker for the preliminary diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. High separation efficiency, simple sample preparation, environmental friendliness, and low cost are the main advantages of this proposed method.