Assessment of the diagnostic accuracy of circulating cardiac troponin I concentration to distinguish between cats with cardiac and non-cardiac causes of respiratory distress

✍ Scribed by David J. Connolly; David C. Brodbelt; Hannah Copeland; Stephen Collins; Virginia Luis Fuentes

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 205 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1760-2734
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jvc.2009.09.002

✦ Synopsis

Objective:

To determine if serum cardiac troponin i (ctni) concentrations can distinguish cardiac from non-cardiac causes of respiratory distress (rd) in cats.

Animals, materials and methods:

53 cats. ctni concentrations were measured in 30 cats with non-cardiac respiratory distress (rd-nc) and compared to 23 cats with rd due to congestive heart failure (rd+chf).

Results:

The rd+chf group had higher median ctni concentration (0.94 ng/ml interquartile range iqr 0.54-4.00, range < 0.20-90.14) than the rd-nc group (< 0.2 ng/ml iqr < 0.2-0.33, range < 0.20-41.1, p<0.001). the area under the curve (auc) was 0.842 (95% ci 0.728-0.955) for the receiver operator curve (roc) analysis of the accuracy of ctni concentrations to discriminate rd+chf from rd-nc cats. a cut-off of > or = 0.81 ng/ml discriminated rd+chf from rd-nc cats with a sensitivity and specificity of 65.2% and 90.0% respectively. however considerable overlap in ctni concentrations between the 2 groups was identified.

Conclusions:

Serum ctni concentrations were different in rd+chf compared to rd-nc cats. however the overlap in ctni concentrations between the 2 groups reduced the clinical efficacy of the assay which therefore should not be used as a stand-alone test but in combination with other diagnostics such as echocardiography and radiography.