ABSTRACT
Cholesterol has become a national health obsession: people hear about it in the media, see it on food packages, and discuss it in the doctor's office. Modern cholesterol determinations had their beginnings in the late nineteenth century, when Ernst Leopold Salkowski described the color reaction when this constituent of gallstones, dissolved in chloroform, was treated with concentrated sulfuric acid. The development of a practicable color reaction and the discovery that digitonin precipitates cholesterol quantitatively and relatively easily, provided a stimulus to further investigation of methods for the determination of cholesterol in human blood. According to the College of Pathologists Survey for 1992, all 5548 participating laboratories reported data on cholesterol with enzymatic procedures, using 29 different analyzers from 13 different manufacturers. The inconsistency of such findings cast doubt on the significance of total cholesterol level in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. In cholestatic jaundice, both conjugated and unconjugated bilirubin may be demonstrated in the serum.
