Circulating coenzyme Q10 concentration

Method

Plasma or serum total coenzyme Q10 concentration by high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical or ultraviolet detection. Any lipid adjustment, and the time since the last dose, are recorded on the edge.

The method is part of the endpoint identity. Studies measuring the same quantity by a different method are held as separate endpoints.

Notes

AN EXPOSURE AND ADHERENCE BIOMARKER, NOT A HEALTH OUTCOME, and the single most confusable item in the coenzyme Q10 set: an edge treating a rise here as efficacy asserts only that the capsule was absorbed and taken. It must never be graded as clinical benefit or substituted for a downstream endpoint. Its near-miss is any clinical coenzyme Q10 outcome - fatigue, ejection fraction, statin-associated myalgia - reported alongside it in the same reviews. Note also that plasma concentration is a poor proxy for tissue or intramitochondrial concentration, which is what the mechanistic claim actually requires. Coenzyme Q10 travels on lipoproteins, so an unadjusted value partly tracks lipid concentration and the adjustment used belongs on the edge - that detail sits here rather than in the measurement because naming total cholesterol and LDL there put both into THIS node's matching vocabulary and made the two most-measured lipid endpoints in the corpus unmintable.