To be clinically relevant, a good cardiac biomarker should have four main characteristics. It should be organ-, disease- and stage-specific to be useful in diagnosis. Its release should be timely and its half-life should be long enough to make measurement possible and meaningful. Its serum or blood concentration should be proportional to disease severity; hence, can be used as a monitoring tool. Finally, their concentrations have implications on long-term outcomes. To date, only a handful of cardiac biomarkers have clinical relevance in the intensive care setting—cardiac troponins (as a marker of cardiac injury) and B-type natriuretic peptide (as a marker of cardiac stress) being probably the most useful. However, cautious interpretations of these biomarkers are needed in intensive care patients as several confounding factors can affect their concentrations.
Population pharmacokinetics of dexmedetomidine during long-term sedation in intensive care patients
