Washington, DC, December 10, 2010 The American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) announces a webinar hs - Troponin: Should it Play a Role in Risk-Stratifying & Managing Heart Failure Patients? on February 16, 2011, at 2:00 pm Eastern. The webinar lasts 90 minutes.
Accumulating evidence indicates that today’s highly sensitive troponin (hs-cTn) assays can detect circulating cTn in patients with chronic and acute heart failure, and that measuring its presence in these patients could have prognostic implications. As newer and more sensitive assays are developed, larger numbers of heart failure patients are found to have detectable cTn and, as a result, the relationship between the scale of circulating cTn in a patient’s bloodstream and outcome is becoming clearer. Researchers believe that measuring cTn will help them understand the mechanism of worsening heart failure, improve risk stratification, and detect potential injury related to new therapeutics. However, should clinicians be using cTn assays for this purpose?
The expert panel for the webinar, from the University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, MD, is Robert Christenson, PhD, Professor of Pathology, Medical & Research Technology and Christopher deFilippi, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine. These cardiac marker experts have studied the potential use of both hs-cTn and natriuretic peptides in the risk stratification and/or management of heart failure patients and will discuss how troponin assays have evolved over the years to become the specific and sensitive biomarkers of cardiac injury that labs use today, what characteristics labs can expect from the hs-cTn assays, current information on the clinical stages, incidence and prevalence of heart failure in the U.S. population, and more. Drs. Christenson and deFilippi contributed to an article Association of Serial Measures of Cardiac Troponin T Using a Sensitive Assay With Incident Heart Failure and Cardiovascular Mortality in Older Adults published in the December 8, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Follow this link to read an abstract.
Heart disease remains the number one cause of death in the United States. AACC invites journalists reporting on this major health issue to participate in this important webinar. For a complimentary registration, complete and submit a Press Registration Form. For more information about the webinar or AACC, contact Peter Patterson on either of the above phone numbers or at ppatterson@aacc.org.