Traditionally, long-term monitoring of patients with heart failure is very imperfect. It would be very beneficial to have an inexpensive biochemical marker to monitor heart failure. Is BNP such a marker? If there is a bedside BNP test, it may be possible to monitor patients with heart failure like diabetics. BNP has great potential in this regard.
Tsutamoto et al. followed up 85 patients with CHF (EF < 45%) for two years, and compared the role of BNP, ANP, cGMP, etc. in the prognostic assessment of CHF, and found that plasma BNP was superior to estimating the mortality rate of patients with chronic CHF. ANP and cGMP, and the prognostic information provided is independent of other hemodynamic parameters such as PCWP and LVEF. In the elderly population, elevated plasma BNP concentrations were significantly associated with overall population mortality, which was predicted by measurement of plasma BNP regardless of established cardiovascular disease.
Plasma BNP levels are positively correlated with the degree of LVD after AMI, and studies have shown that the increase in BNP secretion is mainly concentrated in the border zone between the infarcted and non-infarcted areas, where the mechanical tension of the ventricular wall is the largest, so BNP can accurately reflect the infarcted local ventricular wall tension. The tension is affected by factors such as infarct size, left ventricular morphological changes, and myocardial mechanical stress. Therefore, measuring plasma BNP in patients after myocardial infarction can simultaneously predict the size of the infarct area and left ventricular function. Several reports have suggested that the determination of plasma BNP is a simple, accurate and useful biochemical indicator for predicting the process of left ventricular remodeling after myocardial infarction. The determination of the risk of myocardial infarction is a good screening method of high quality.