The significance of H-FABP and BNP levels in diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction.

Early interventions aimed at restoring coronary blood flow in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) reduces myocardial damage and improves patient outcome. Yet, a timely diagnosis can be a diagnostic challenge for the clinician. We aimed to compare the potential diagnostic efficacy of Brain-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) and heart-type fatty acid binding protein (H-FABP) with other cardiac-markers to examine their usefulness in early confirmatory markers of acute myocardial infarction. Eighty subjects were recruited in this study, including 40 AMI patients, 40 patients suffering from non-cardiac chest pain as well as 10 healthy subjects. Receiver Operator Characteristic Curve (ROC) analysis showed H-FABP to be a good discriminator between patients with AMI and patients without AMI. Both H-FABP and BNP were found to be more sensitive than troponin (89%, 79.5% vs.61.3%), in the same line, H-FABP and BNP showed higher specificity when compared to troponin (89.9%, 82.4%, vs. 61.5%) in diagnosing of AMI. In conclusion; H-FABP is a promising discriminator biomarker for the early detection of patients with acute myocardial infarction admitted within 3-6 hours from the onset of chest pain either alone or in combination with troponin.