1 – Program overview

This external quality assessment program evaluates the accuracy of catecholamines, methoxylated derivatives, homovanillic acid, vanillylmandelic acid and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid assays in urine.

Participating labs can choose to be assessed for all the analytes of this program, or simply a subset of analytes of interest.

2 – Assessment frequency

Number of surveys per year: 6
Number of control samples per survey: 2
Number of samples per year: 12

3 – List of analytes assessed 

• 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA)
• Homovanillic acid
• Vanillylmandelic acid
• Catecholamines
  • - Adrenaline (epinephrine)
  • - Noradrenaline (norepinephrine)
  • - Dopamine
• Methoxylated derivatives
  • - Total metanephrine
  • - Total normetanephrine
  • - Total 3-methoxytyramine
  • - Free metanephrine
  • - Free normetanephrine
  • - Free 3-methoxytyramine
• Urinary creatinine

4 – Description of the control samples

Lyophilised human control urine (samples to be resuspended in 5 mL of distilled water + 40 μL of 6M HCl),