Questionable Biomarkers for Heart Risk

Ivanhoe Newswire

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Doctors know risk factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking put people at increased risk for heart attacks and strokes. But these conditions can strike people without these risk factors as well, so finding additional ways to identify risk is vital to ensuring people who need preventive treatments like cholesterol-lowering drugs get them.

Researchers who looked at the value of biomarkers to find higher risk individuals, however, came up short in a recent study. While two out of six biomarkers (N-BNP and MR-proADM) significantly improved prediction of coronary events like heart attacks, and two also predicted cardiovascular events like stroke (N-BNP and C-reactive protein), most often these biomarkers caused a person to move to a lower risk category than that determined by standard risk factors.

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"While there was more category movement among participants initially classified as intermediate-risk, that resulted primarily from movement to lower risk levels, so we still need to find biomarkers that can make a clinically significant difference in predicting cardiovascular risk," study author Christopher Newton-Cheh, M.D., M.PH., from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Heart Center was quoted as saying.

Fellow author Thomas Wang, M.D., also from the MGH Heart Center, believes more study may eventually find biomarkers that do predict a higher risk. "We're still optimistic that new technologies will lead to the discovery of biomarkers than could help us move toward offering truly personalized cardiovascular risk prediction."

The study is based on more than 5,000 people enrolled in a large clinical trial in Sweden.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, published online June 30, 2009