European Heart Journal Advance Access originally published online on June 14, 2007
European Heart Journal 2007 28(14):1678-1682; doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehm234
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The potential to improve primary prevention in the future by using BNP/N-BNP as an indicator of silent pancardiac target organ damage
BNP/N-BNP could become for the heart what microalbuminuria is for the kidney
Division of Medicine and Therapeutics, Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 9SY, UK
Received 8 March 2007; revised 4 May 2007; accepted 10 May 2007; online publish-ahead-of-print 14 June 2007.
* Corresponding author. Tel: +44 1382 632180; fax: +44 1382 644972. E-mail address: a.d.struthers{at}dundee.ac.uk
Brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) or N-terminal pro-BNP (N-BNP) now appears to be the best independent predictor of cardiovascular mortality over and above the conventional ones like blood pressure. This may be because a high BNP/N-BNP is identifying any form of asymptomatic cardiac target organ damage (TOD) [especially silent ischaemia, left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), left atrial dilatation/atrial fibrillation (LAD/AF) and LV systolic dysfunction (LVSD)]. There are strong hints that BNP/N-BNP will also identify those who are going to develop LVH, LAD/AF, and LVSD in a few years' time. Thus, the prospects are good that BNP/N-BNP could be used to identify pancardiac TOD, even when it is silent and that this information could be harnessed to improve primary prevention. BNP/N-BNP could become to the heart what microalbuminuria is to the kidneys, i.e. an indicator of early, silent TOD.
Key Words: Hypertension Hypertrophy Coronary circulation Echocardiography Other diagnostic testing Heart failure Congestive
![]()
CiteULike
Connotea
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
![]() |
J. C Kelder, F. H Rutten, and A. W Hoes Clinically relevant diagnostic research in primary care: the example of B-type natriuretic peptides in the detection of heart failure Fam. Pract., February 1, 2009; 26(1): 69 - 74. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
||||
