Utility of Heart-type Fatty Acid Binding Protein as a New Biochemical Marker for the Early Diagnosis of Acute Coronary Syndrome.

Introduction: Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) refers to a constellation of clinical symptoms caused by acute myocardial ischemia. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are major and growing contributors to mortality and disability in India.

Aims And Objectives: Especially patients with non-ACS-related troponin elevations have an adverse outcome and require careful patient management. So, we look forward for another marker Heart-type Fatty Acid Binding Protein (H-FABP) that reliably detects myocardial ischemia in the absence of necrosis and would be useful for initial identification and for differentiating patients with chest pain of aetiology other than coronary ischemia.

Materials And Methods: The study was done on 88 subjects of whom 34 subjects were with ischemic chest pain, 29 were with non-ischemic chest pain and 25 were normal subjects.

Results: Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was done which showed that area under the curve (AUC) for H-FABP was 0.885(0.79-0.94) and that of high-sensitive Troponin T (hs-TnT) in initial six hours was 0.805(0.70-0.88). The specificity of H-FABP was higher compare to hs-TnT while sensitivity was comparable during 0-6 h of presentation of chest pain.

Conclusion: H-FABP can be used as an additional marker to hs-TnT in diagnosis of myocardial infarction (MI) and for exclusion of non-AMI (acute myocardial infarction) patients.