ELECTROKINETIC CHROMATOGRAPHY OF SERUM BILE ACIDS IN INTRAHEPATIC CHOLESTASIS OF PREGNANCY DURING URSODEOXYCHOLIC ACID (UDCA) TREATMENT

LUCANGIOLI SILVIA,; FLOR S.,; TRIPODI V.

Queretaro, mexico

Simposio; 12th Latin-American Symposium on Biotechnology, Biomedical, Biopharmaceutical and Industrial Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis and Microchip Technology; 2006

LACE

Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP) is a condition of unknown ethiology characterized by generalized pruritus and abnormal liver tests that occurs predominantly during the third trimester of pregnancy. In a previous work we have demonstrated that patients with ICP show increments in total serum bile acids (SBA) and significant differences in their profiles involving a shift towards a characteristic hydrophobic composition with an important increase in litocholic acid (LCA) and deoxicholic acid (DCA) compared to normal pregnant women. Several clinical studies have established the importance of UDCA therapy in reducing pruritus, total SBA and aminotransferases levels, in patients with ICP but there is no datum on the influence of UDCA on the SBA profile of maternal sera. Moreover, there is a lack of an analytical system capable of simultaneous quantitation of each important bile acid with high precision and accuracy applied to this type of patients. In this work we evaluate the SBA profile in patients with ICP during UDCA administration by a simple and rapid capillary electrophoresis (CE) method with UV detection that allows to completely resolve 15 bile acids in serum. The experimental conditions were: 75µm x 60cm capillary using a background electrolyte of SDS in a mixture of ciclodextrines dissolved in 20mM borate-phosphate buffer at pH: 7.0, 30ºC and detection at 185nm. The results showed that, even when there was not a significant reduction on total SBA levels after UDCA therapy in absolute terms, the SBA profile dramatically changed with a significative reduction in LCA and DCA levels. Our results could establish that CE is an excellent method of choice firstly to evaluate each SBA in a single run because individual SBA offer more information rather than total SBA determinations, and secondly to evaluate the importance of UDCA treatment for the correction of maternal SBA profile in ICP