BioProject

Despite the significant reduction in the overall burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) over the past decade, CVD still accounts for a third of all deaths in the United States and worldwide each year. More...

Despite the significant reduction in the overall burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) over the past decade, CVD still accounts for a third of all deaths in the United States and worldwide each year. While efforts to identify and reduce risk factors for atherosclerotic heart disease (i.e. hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes mellitus, cigarette smoking, inactivity) remain the focus of primary prevention, the inability to accurately and temporally predict acute myocardial infarction (AMI) impairs our ability to further improve patient outcomes. Our diagnostic evaluation for the presence of coronary artery disease relies on functional testing, which detects flow-limiting coronary stenosis, but we have known for decades that most lesions underlying AMI are only of mild to moderate luminal narrowings, not obstructing coronary blood flow. Accordingly, there is a dire need of improved diagnostics for underlying arterial plaque dynamics, fissure and rupture. Here we describe the designation of a specific gene expression pattern acting as a molecular signature for acute myocardial infarction present in whole blood of patients that was determined using microarray analysis of enriched circulating endothelial cells (CEC). We isolated circulating endothelial cells from patients experience acute myocardial infartion and healthy cohorts, and measured gene expression using the HG-133U_PLUS_2 microarray Overall design: Circulating endothelial cells were isolated from patients experiencing acute myocardial infarction (n=49) and from healthy cohorts (n=50). The patients were separated into a discovery cohort (n=43) for biomarker discovery and model training; and into a validation cohort (n=56) for biomarker validation and model testing. Less...