Study on blood coagulant/fibrinolytic activity at plasma and monocytic levels in coronary heart disease patients with blood-stasis syndrome of traditional chinese medicine

Abstract

To explore and compare the changes of coagulant/fibrinolytic activity in coronary heart disease (CHD) patients with Blood Stasis Syndrome of TCM and evaluate the roles of these changes.Eighty patients of CHD were divided into two groups by Syndrome Differentiation of TCM, the Blood-Stasis (BS) group (30 cases) and the non-Blood-Stasis (NBS) group (50 cases, including 27 cases of Phlegm-Dampness Syndrome and 23 cases of Qi-Stagnation Syndrome); and 20 healthy persons were enrolled as normal control group. Tissue type plasminogen activator (t-PA) and its inhibitor (PAI-1) in plasma and in human peripheral blood monocyte cell (PBMC), as well as the procoagulant activity (PCA) in PBMC were measured by chromogenic substrate method.The plasma PAI-1 activity and PCA of PBMC in the BS group were significantly higher than those in the NBS group and the normal control group (P < 0.01). PAI-1 activity of PBMC in the two groups of CHD patients was higher than those in the normal control group significantly (P < 0.01), but no significant difference was found between the BS group and the NBS group (P > 0.05). The difference of plasma t-PA activity between the two groups of CHD was insignificant. The PBMC t-PA activity in the BS group was lower than that in the NBS and normal control groups (P < 0.01).In the CHD patients with BS, the PBMC PCA was increased and the fibrinolytic activity at both plasma and monocyte levels lowered significantly, these changes in coagulant/fibrinolytic activity may be the important pathologic factors in forming BS which suggests that CHD patients with BS were in the prothrombotic state.