title: Nerve growth factor serum concentrations in healthy human volunteers: physiological variance and stability.
abstract: Human nerve growth factor (NGF) serum concentrations were measured in a healthy sample of 126 participants by a modified highly sensitive and specific two-site enzyme immunoassay. The measured NGF concentrations differ considerably from a normal distribution. The median NGF concentration was 19.68 pg/ml with an interquartile range of 11.06-41.74 pg/ml, which means that 50% of the NGF levels are in this range. In our healthy sample, we found no gender differences but a slight age-related decrease of NGF (r=-0.1326, P=0.1560). Moreover intraindividual stability of NGF was examined in ten volunteers, where no significant changes of serum NGF concentrations were detected over 4 weeks. This stability of our repetitive measurements over 4 weeks suggests that this neurotrophin may be an intraindividually solid marker at least in human serum.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Free University of Berlin, Eschenallee 3, 14050 Berlin, Germany. undine.lang@medizin.fu-berlin.de
authors.forename: Undine E
authors.initials: UE
authors.lastname: Lang
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gallinat
authors.forename: Heidi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Danker-Hopfe
authors.forename: Malek
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bajbouj
authors.forename: Rainer
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hellweg
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007124:Immunoenzyme Techniques; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D020932:Nerve Growth Factor / Q000097:blood*; D012016:Reference Values; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric
chemical_list: D020932:Nerve Growth Factor