December 2, 2003

Alan H.B. Wu, PhD

Co-Sponsored by AACC’s Critical and Point-of-Care Testing Division 

Millions of times each year, the onset of chest pain prompts a visit to the hospital emergency room, where it can set off a well-orchestrated series of diagnostic events to determine if a patient is having a myocardial infarction (MI). Traditionally, clinical symptoms and characteristic electrocardiogram (ECG) changes have been important tools in the diagnosis of MI, but symptoms are non-specific in up to one-third of chest-pain patients and ECG misses up to half of the patients who have had an MI.

Today, laboratory testing for cardiac troponin has made some inroads into simplifying the evaluation of chest-pain patients. In fact it is currently the gold standard for the diagnosis of myocardial infarction, although it remains a far from prefect tool for evaluating patients with chest pain. Medical researchers now think that the optimal tool for chest-pain assessment may actually be a panel of individual markers. One emerging analyte that researchers are taking a close look at is ischemia modified albumin (IMA). Preliminary studies indicate that IMA, cardiac troponin, and ECG can recognize 95% of ischemic patients with acute coronary syndrome, often a precursor of MI.

Is IMA a valuable contributor in the assessment of patients with chest pain? Could IMA, in concert with other markers, provide an optimized tool for cardiac assessment in the ED or post-therapy risk-stratification? View Dr. Wu’s highly informative presentation, and then ask the expert, LIVE ONLINE.