Circadian rhythms of cardiac troponins: mechanisms and clinical significance

Abstract

Modern laboratory methods for determining biomarkers of cardiovascular diseases are highly sensitive and can detect almost single molecules in human biological fluids, significantly speeding up and improving the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. However, in this case, there is a decrease in specificity and it is necessary to take into account a number of additional factors that may affect the result of the study. Recent studies have shown that circadian rhythms (CR) are among these factors. This review article is devoted to the discussion of recently discovered CR of cardiac troponins (CT). A number of articles reported that, both in healthy people and in patients with a number of chronic diseases, CT concentrations change during the day. Given that modern algorithms for diagnosing myocardial infarction (MI) are based on serial studies (0-1 h and 0-3 h) of blood serum, and the values of CT in the blood serum for the diagnosis of myocardial infarction (MI) for this period of time are only a few ng/l, the CT CR can to some extent affect the accuracy of MI diagnosis. Thus, natural physiological changes in the concentration of CT during the day can be mistakenly interpreted as diagnostically significant deviations and lead to an erroneous interpretation of laboratory test results.

Keywords

• сardiac troponins
• circadian rhythms
• cardiovascular diseases
• myocardial infarction