The troponins

New cardiac-specific markers have recently been introduced into the arena of cardiac diagnostic tests. The cardiac troponins, because of their extraordinary high specificity for myocardial cell injury, have gained particular interest. They can be used in a variety of clinical situations: including differentiation of skeletal from cardiac muscle injury; detection of minor myocardial cell damage in coronary insufficiency syndromes, which allows stratification of patients into high-and low-risk categories; detection of perioperative myocardial infarction; estimation of infarct size; and assessment of therapeutic success of reperfusion therapy. The application of the troponin proteins in relation to percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty and in the diagnosis of acute myocarditis has also been recently described.