Recent trends in determination of thiamine and its derivatives in clinical practice

- Monitoring of thiamine status is beneficial in many pathological conditions.
- Analysis of free thiamine is not relevant without the knowledge of active forms.
- There is lack of sensitive method in biomatrices useful in clinical practice.
- Many internal standards are proposed but only few methods use them.
- Automation and miniaturization are future trends for thiamine analysis.

Over the last five decades, many methods to analyze thiamine (vitamin B1) and its phosphorylated forms in urine, whole blood, serum, plasma and erythrocytes have been proposed. Some of the methods are presently used in routine practice, but analytical problems regarding reproducibility, standardization, lack of automation, time consuming procedures for pretreatment and analysis are often discussed. With modern approaches to bioanalysis in clinical research of vitamins, whole processes can be automated, making analysis less time consuming, with reduced consumption of solvents and samples. This review critically discusses various analytical techniques, their advantages and disadvantages that are used for determination of thiamine and its derivatives in clinical practice, with emphasis on accurate, reliable and fast analytical procedures.