Observation on the changes in lactate dehydrogenase isoenzymes in post-burn patients: Significance in relation to creatine kinase

Abstract

The present study deals with the quantitative assessment of lactate dehydrogenase isoenzymes in the sera of burn subjects. Efforts are also made here to show better predictive marker value of sera LDH, as a few other known protein markers like creatine kinase and myoglobin have limited analytical value in the management of thermal burns. Blood was initially collected at day-1 of admission from 29 burn and 10 healthy subjects. Further, the sampling was carried out at 2, 5, 10, 20 and 30 days of wound healing (recovery). Plasma and sera LDH isoenzymes were monitored on 7.5% polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Quantitative assessment of LDH isoenzymes was done from gelscans using GelPro and Scion Imaging softwares. Sera CK levels were estimated colorimetrically using reagent kits. Our results show that quantitative changes in LDH isoenzyme were more convincing and interpretable in the sera than plasma. Sera LDH-5 isoenzyme was detected as the major contributor of total sera LDH activity, which follows a change parallel to sera CK in burn subjects. Sera LDH-5 activity also remains significantly high for up to 10 days while sera CK levels were detected elevated up to 5 days (P<0.05) during the recovery of patients. Therefore, the present findings strongly recommended the use of sera to assess the LDH activity and indicate better stability of sera LDH-5 than sera CK during post burn wound healing.

Keywords

• biomarker
• lactate dehydrogenase isoenzymes
• polyacrylamide gel electrophoretic profiles
• sera creatinekinase
• thermal burns