Extensive serum biomarker analysis in patients with ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI)

ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality and some characteristics of STEMI are poorly understood. The aim of the present study is to detect protein expression profiles in the serum of STEMI patients, and to identify biomarkers for this disease. Cytokine profiles of serum from STEMI patients and healthy controls were analyzed with a semi-quantitative human antibody array for 174 proteins, and the results showed blood serum concentrations of 21 cytokines differed considerably between STEMI patients and healthy subjects. In the next phase, a sandwich ELISA kit individually validated eight biomarker results from 21 of the microarray experiments. Clinical validation demonstrated a significant increase of BNDF, PDGF-AA and MMP-9 in patients with AMI. Meanwhile, BNDF, PDGF-AA and MMP-9 distinguished AMI patients from healthy controls with a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves of 0.870, 0.885, and 0.81, respectively, with diagnostic cut-off points of 0.688 ng/mL, 297.86 ng/mL and 690.066 ng/mL. Our study indicated that these three cytokines were up-regulated in STEMI samples, and may hold promise for the assessment of STEMI.