KCS

Estradiol (E2) is a biologically active sex steroid hormone that serves as important diagnostic marker in serum of premenopausal and postmenopausal women and in men. Particularly, the serum E2 concentration is very low (< 10 pg/mL) in prepubertal girls. In the past decades, several technologies, including high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and immunoassays have been developed for the measurement of E2. Unfortunately, current clinical detection methods are insufficient for accurate assessment of E2 at low concentrations (< 10 pg/mL). Thus, there is an urgent need for new technologies with efficient and sensitive detection of E2 for use in routine clinical diagnostics. In this study, we introduce a new E2 assay technique using a surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-based detection method. The SERS-based assay was performed with 30 blood samples to assess its clinical feasibility, and the limit of detection of E2 using the novel SERS-based assay described in this study was 0.65 pg/mL. Furthermore, this method showed a good correlation compared with the commercially available chemiluminescent microparticle immunoassay (CMIA) kit. Thus, the proposed SERS-based assay has a strong potential to be a valuable tool in the early diagnosis of precocious puberty due to its excellent analytical sensitivity.