Diagnostic Effectiveness of Electrophoresis and Specific Protein Assays, Evaluated by Discriminate Analysis

Abstract

Abstract With use of the serum protein pattern as a model, we compared the "Diagnostic Effectiveness" of tests of different chemical specificity—i.e., the percentage classified correctly according to the clinical diagnosis. When results obtained from a selected population of subjects with selected diseases were evaluated by multivariate analysis, disease discrimination by paper electrophoresis, which resolves only chemically heterogeneous fractions, was similar to that of a battery of specific assays for individual proteins.