• Evangelos Giannitsis and Hugo A Katus.
• Department of Internal Medicine III, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
• Herz. 2009 Dec 1;34(8):600-6.

AbstractFor years, cardiac troponins (cTn) have been regarded as the preferred biomarkers for the diagnosis of myocardial infarction and for the risk stratification of patients with acute coronary syndromes, as well as for the selection of patients who need an early invasive strategy, and for the guidance of adjunctive pharmacological therapy. In addition, measurement of cTn has been found useful for detection of myocardial necrosis in conditions unrelated to myocardial ischemia including acute pulmonary embolism, myocarditis, heart failure, sepsis, and end-stage renal disease. In these conditions, an unfavorable prognosis is unequivocally associated with detectable concentrations of cTn.A major limitation of most currently available cTn assays is the lack of adequate precision, i.e., to measure cTn concentrations at the 99th percentile value with a coefficient of variation < 10%. As a consequence, many manufacturers have developed more sensitive cTn assays that now comply with precision criteria required by the Joint European Society of Cardiology/ American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association/World Heart Federation Task Force for the Redefinition of Acute Myocardial Infarction.Using assays with higher analytic sensitivity more patients will be seen in clinical practice with the high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (TnThs) above the 99th percentile discriminator. The causes of these elevations may be due to acute, subacute and chronic cardiac disease such as heart failure or cardiomyopathies.

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