Cardiovascular Biomarkers

In the four pages committed to a discussion of myocardial infarction in the first edition of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, published in 1950, there was no mention of use of the laboratory for management of patients. Thirty years later, when the first edition of Braunwald’s Heart Disease, A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine was published, 2 out of the 1943 pages in the text contained a discussion of the laboratory examinations in acute myocardial infarction. Our knowledge base of