Seasonality of the Cardiac Biomarker Troponin in the Eastern Croatian Population.

BACKGROUND

The seasonality of acute myocardial infarction and progressive heart failure has been well established so far. Cardiac troponins (cTns) are organ-specific, not disease-specific, biomarkers. The seasonality of cTns has not been reported before.

METHODS

Data were collected from the emergency admission unit of a community hospital in eastern Croatia for each month of the year 2014 covering the number of patients whose doctors requested high-sensitivity cTn I (hs-cTn I) testing, the number of positive test results and hospital admissions.

RESULTS

The proportion of patients with positive test results was 15.75% (350 patients out of 2221 patients referred to testing), with the males being outnumbered by the females (F: 57.15%, M: 42.85%) ( = 0.069). The month with the highest number of patients with positive test results was December, whereas the month with the lowest number of those patients was January ( < 0.001). The highest numbers of patients referred to testing (30.9%) and of those with positive test results (50.8%) were found in the oldest age group (76+).

CONCLUSION

Tracking the results of cTns testing during patient admissions to emergency departments would be a more effective approach from a public health perspective than tracking the number of patients diagnosed with a particular cardiovascular (CV) disease and could be used as a research approach to guide a search for precipitating factors for CV disease specific to a local community.