Quantification of plasma lipoprotein fractions by wavelet transform time‐domain data processing of the proton nuclear magnetic resonance methylene spectral region

Quantitative analysis of lipoprotein major fractions, LDL, VLDL and HDL, is of great interest for medical purposes, for instance in liver or heart diseases, diet management or cancer. The presently available biochemical methods require time consuming ultracentrifugation. A potentially automated method is proposed, using time domain quantification by Wavelet Transform (WT‐NMR) method. The aim of the present study was to evaluate, on a preliminary series of nine human plasmas, the potential interest of WT‐NMR in the quantification of both NMR‐visible lipids and total lipoprotein fractions. The correlation coefficients between low and intermediate density (LDL+IDL), very low density (VLDL) and high density (HDL) lipoprotein visible lipid quantifications, obtained on nine human plasmas with WT‐NMR and standard biochemical methods, were 0.79, 0.84 and 0.92, respectively. For the total lipoprotein assay, i.e. including an estimation of non NMR‐visible protein and free cholesterol, the correlation between WT‐NMR and the biochemistry were 0.87 for LDL+IDL, 0.81 for VLDL and 0.88 for HDL.© 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.