The Introduction and Clinical Use of Cardiac-Specific Troponin Assays.

The earliest biomarkers introduced to diagnose myocardial infarction (MI) such as aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and lactic dehydrogenase (LDH) lacked cardiac specificity and were replaced by creatine kinase (CK), the CK-MB isoenzyme, and ultimately the cardiac-specific troponins (cTnT and cTnI). This has opened up the possibilities of ruling out MI more rapidly and also identifying patients with a chronic elevation of cTn and a poor prognosis in a range of cardiac conditions.