An easy and reliable automated method to estimate oxidative stress in the clinical setting.

During the last few years, reliable and simple tests have been proposed to estimate oxidative stress in vivo. Many of them can be easily adapted to automated analyzers, permitting the simultaneous processing of a large number of samples in a greatly reduced time, avoiding manual sample and reagent handling, and reducing variability sources. In this chapter, description of protocols for the estimation of reactive oxygen metabolites and the antioxidant capacity (respectively the d-ROMs and OXY Adsorbent Test, Diacron, Grosseto, Italy) by using the clinical chemistry analyzer SYNCHRON, CX 9 PRO (Beckman Coulter, Brea, CA, USA) is reported as an example of such an automated procedure that can be applied in the clinical setting. Furthermore, a calculation to compute a global oxidative stress index (Oxidative-INDEX), reflecting both oxidative and antioxidant counterparts, and, therefore, a potentially more powerful parameter, is also described.