Serum Amyloid A (SAA) is an early and sensitive blood biomarker for tissue injury and inflammation and has been indicated in many inflammatory diseases.

The level of SAA circulating in the blood is known to increase dramatically in response to tissue damage or inflammation, classifying it as an acute phase protein. SAA concentrations may increase up to 1000-fold following inflammation, infection, tissue injury and cell necrosis and decline rapidly following recovery.

In the past, the use of SAA tests for routine diagnosing in the equine clinic has been hampered by the lack of commercially available rapid, reliable and automated methods, which are preferred in a routine diagnostic setting. With the SOLO SAA test this parameter is now conveniently available in all kind of labs as well as in the field.

To visit the SAA test page Click here to open the SAA test page

It has been observed in several veterinary species – e.g. horses – that SAA is a very useful inflammatory marker that may be used for detection of clinical and possibly subclinical disease, monitoring of disease activity and response to therapy, prognostication, and detection of spread of infections in herds. The kinetic profile of the SAA response makes SAA an excellent indicator of inflammation. Hepatic SAA synthesis begins shortly after an inflammatory insult. As a result plasma concentrations start to increase within few hours, and they peak 36–48 h after injury, as demonstrated previously in horses after experimental induction of inflammatory or infectious disease. After resolution of disease serum SAA concentrations decrease very quickly, thus closely reflecting recovery. This is due to the short plasma half-life of the SAA protein – values reported in laboratory rodents range from 30 min to 2 h. Serum levels of SAA will therefore decrease quickly after synthesis ceases. These characteristics make SAA well suited not only for diagnosing the presence of inflammation, but also for real-time monitoring of inflammation.

Eurolyser SAA (Serum Amyloid A) test

Performed on the Eurolyser solo veterinary point of care analyser, testing SAA is a fully quantitative, automatic point of care measurement of SAA in serum or plasma (and in several cases milk and synovial fluids can be used for SAA detection as well) in a single test format.

In just 6 minutes the result is comfortably displayed on the instruments screen and/or can be printed to an optional printer or sent to a host interface. The Eurolyser SAA test allows veterinary professionals to integrate SAA measurement as a point of care diagnostics tool. Performing the convenient test during the treatment period will allow the veterinarian to monitor the effects of the selected treatment.

The high performance characteristics of the SOLO SAA assay ensures perfect correlation to reference methods such as EIKEN chemicals SAA assay.

Characteristics

Measurement range: 10-500 µg/ml (10-500 mg/l)

Within run reproducibility: cv < 8% at 19 µg/ml

Lower detection limit: 10 µg/ml

Sample Volume: 5µl

For more informations, please visit the SAA test page .

You can also access this page by clicking through „Veterinary Diagnostics -> Available Parameters -> SAA“ via the menu above.