Aldo Clerico
The Increasing Impact of Laboratory Medicine on Clinical Cardiology
The practice of cardiology continues to evolve along
with a better understanding of the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease and the development of new therapeutic procedures. Consequently, new demands
are being made on the in vitro diagnostics industry to improve the performance of existing cardiac markers and to develop novel markers for new cardiac disease
indications. Indeed, in the last 20 years there has been a progressive increase in new laboratory tests for markers of cardiac diseases. Several highly sensitive
and/or specific assays for the detection of myocardial ischemic damage as well as some immunoassays for cardiac natriuretic hormones, now considered a reliable
marker of myocardial function, have become commercially available. In parallel, a growing number of some novel risk factors, which can be assessed and monitored by laboratory methods, have been added to the classical risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Finally,
the recent explosion of genetic analysis may soon place at the clinical cardiologist's disposal many laboratory tests for defining the diagnosis at the molecular
level, assessing new risk factors, and better targeting the pharmaceutical approaches in patients with cardiovascular disease. In the present article, after a brief description of the analytical tests included in these four groups, each group's impact on clinical cardiology
is discussed in detail.
Clinical Chemical Laboratory Medicine, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 1434-6621
Volume: 41, 07/2003
Pages: 871 - 883
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