To establish a novel approach to classify fibrinogen disorders, we investigated the potential of clot waveform analysis (CWA) of CFA and searched for a surrogate marker for fibrinogen Ag.
We analyzed CWA parameters obtained from CFA using plasma from normal patients (n = 91) and those with fibrinogen disorders (n = 27, including 15 hypofibrinogenemia, 6 dysfibrinogenemia and 6 hypodysfibrinogenemia) with a CS-5100 autoanalyzer.
We found that maximum coagulation velocity (Min1) levels were most strongly correlated with fibrinogen Ag in both normal and fibrinogen disorders. Hence, Min1 appeared to function as a surrogate for fibrinogen Ag. Although the Ac/Min1 ratio did not simply reflect the measured Ac/Ag ratio, we found that the Ac/Min1 ratio was significantly higher than normal in hypofibrinogenemia and hypodysfibrinogenemia, but not in dysfibrinogenemia. On the other hand, we could distinguish type II deficiency from type I using estimated fibrinogen Ag (eAg) predicted from Min1. The Ac/eAg ratios of dysfibrinogenemia and hypodysfibrinogenemia were significantly lower than those of normal and hypofibrinogenemia.
The CWA of CFA could distinguish fibrinogen disorders using a combination of Ac/Min1 and Ac/eAg values. This analysis allows the qualitative detection of fibrinogen disorder easily and represents a novel screening test for fibrinogen disorders.