Application of non-commercial methods for estimation of immunoreactive serum calcitonin in clinical practice (comparison of two methods).

The authors compared the results of two radioimmunological methods for the estimation of immunoreactive calcitonin in human serum. Parallel with the commercial RIA kit the estimation was made by the authors' own modification of this process with their own specific antiserum and radioligand prepared in the laboratory. The results in a large group of patients with medullary carcinoma of the thyroid gland (MCT) in different stages of the disease revealed that although the values obtained by the two methods differ, there is a statistically significant correlation between the values and the clinical evaluation is also comparable.