Chapter 6 - Novel Approaches to Cardiovascular Diagnostics: Focus on Coronary Artery Disease and Myocardial Infarction

Abstract

There is a significant unmet need in the diagnosis and prediction of coronary artery disease (CAD) and subsequent major adverse cardiovascular events including myocardial infarction. Recently, a number of genomic approaches have been taken to address these problems, including genetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic methodologies. Most of these efforts focused on the discovery of putative markers and initial construction of multimarker classifiers for these clinical endpoints and were limited by incomplete clinical validation and comparison to clinical factor models. However, one such classifier for obstructive CAD has been validated in independent multicenter validation cohorts. Initial forays into combining different types of classifiers (genetic, proteomic, etc.) using so-called systems biology approaches is in its infancy but holds considerable promise to further improve the outlook for patients at risk for these serious and prevalent conditions.