clipped from www.mims.com

Testing for stress marker copeptin, meanwhile, can exclude MI with 99 percent certainty, thus saving many patients from unnecessary further testing.

New biomarker tests could slash heart attack diagnosis time

Professor Christian Müller, reviewing the data, said that the new tests could answer an unmet clinical need in the assessment of chest pain, since current troponin tests have an undetectable “blind interval” of 3-4 hours after the onset of MI. Even if patients follow recommendations and present within 2 hours of chest pain, the test will be negative and electrocardiography monitoring will be required for 6 to 8 hours.

“The current-generation troponin tests are important but have important limitations in [making an] early diagnosis. There seem to be two approaches to solve this problem: either use troponin in combination with copeptin, or perhaps the approach now favored by many is the use of sensitive troponin assays,” said Müller, of the University Hospital Basel, Switzerland.