Introduction: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is an ischemic heart disease due to the narrowing of the coronary arteries resulting from atherosclerosis. Blood biomarkers have been well utilized for the diagnosis and prognosis of CAD. However, the value of biomarkers for evaluating coronary atherosclerosis remains to be clarified. This clinical investigation aimed to explore the potential value of biomarkers for evaluating the severity of coronary stenosis in CAD patients.
Methods: The extent of coronary atherosclerosis was accessed by the angiography-based quantitative measurement Gensini score (GS). Blood levels of Brain natriuretic peptide, Copeptin (CPP), Phosphodiesterase 9A, and Pentraxin3 (PTX3) were measured in 56 patients divided into three levels as low GS (n = 17), intermediate GS (n = 19) and high GS (n = 20) based on GS tertiles.
Results: We found that plasma concentrations of CPP and PTX3 were significantly elevated in patients with high GS compared with the low GS group. In addition, Pearson correlation analysis showed that CPP and PTX3 were positively correlated with the GS. Furthermore, Receiver operating characteristics analysis demonstrated that both CPP and PTX3 exhibited discriminative capacities for evaluating the extent of coronary stenosis.
Conclusions: Laboratory tests of CPP and PTX3 via non-invasive means may provide novel information for risk stratification and disease management in CAD patients before invasive angiographic approaches. This study opens the door for enormous opportunities to explore new biomarkers with better efficiency, sensitivity and specificity as alternative/additional methods for evaluating the severity of coronary atherosclerosis in CAD patients in future research.
Keywords: Atherosclerosis; Biomarker; Copeptin; Coronary artery disease; Pentraxin3.
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.