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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- More than one million hospitalizations in 2007 were due to acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services currently spend more money on this medical condition than any other. Now, researchers say measuring a certain protein in cardiac muscles may help determine a patients in-hospital risk of death from ADHF.
Cardiac troponin levels are often used to diagnose acute coronary syndromes, but their relation to ADHF has not been clear. Using the Acute Decompensated Heart Failure National Registry, researchers looked at patients hospitalized for the condition between October 2001 and January 2004. Overall, 6.2 percent of the patients tested positive for troponin. Those patients had lower systolic blood pressure when admitted to the hospital, a lower ejection fraction -- the measure of the amount of blood ejected from the ventricles with each beat -- and had a higher in-hospital mortality rate compared with those troponin-negative.
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These results suggest that measurement of troponin adds important prognostic information to the initial evaluation of patients with acute decompensated heart failure and should be considered as part of an early assessment of risk, study authors write. Researchers say heart failure patients that are troponin-positive required more hospital resources like longer stays in the hospital and the intensive care unit.
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SOURCE: New England Journal of Medicine, 2008;358:2117-2126
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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