Special Focus: Cardiovascular Biomarkers: Interest Seen in Biomarkers for Cardiovascular Disease Risk, But Adoption, Evidence of Clinical Utility Lags

Despite advances in the management of heart disease, cardiovascular (CV) disease remains the leading cause of death. While a lot of effort has been dedicated to the treatment of diagnosed disease, there is increasing focus on screening biomarkers capable of differentiating at-risk individuals to better target preventive therapy. While discovery of novel CV biomarkers, including genetic markers, has garnered attention in recent years, to date proof of clinical utility lags. Biomarker Discovery CV biomarkers have been identified for a number of cardiac conditions including acute coronary syndrome, coronary artery disease (CAD), congestive heart failure (HF), and myocardial infarction (MI). Use of diagnostic biomarkers in patients with symptoms of disease is well-established clinically. But other than for cholesterol, screening biomarkers to assess future CV disease risk has not taken hold in routine practice. “The primary prevention of cardiovascular disease relies on the ability to identify at-risk individuals long before the development of overt events,” writes Thomas Wang, M.D., in a biomarker review piece published in the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Internal Medicine. “In the past decade, research into circulating, genetic, and imaging biomarkers to augment traditional methods of risk prediction has only achieved modest success.” In the 2010 […]