Seasonality of the cardiac biomarker troponin in the eastern Croatian population

Abstract

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%) (p = 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 (p < 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.