Diagnostic and Prognostic Value of Cardiac Biomarkers for Early Coronary Bypass Occlusion in Patients Undergoing Coronary Revascularization

The early diagnosis of the periprocedural myocardial infarction (MI) due to the bypass graft occlusion is an important element, in order to introduce early therapeutic strategies. Invasive coronary angiography (CA) is the gold standard to evaluate the postoperative myocardial ischemia due to the graft occlusion. Since this procedure has several important risks, such as thromboembolic events, dissection, bleeding, and contrast dye-induced nephropathy, in daily clinical practice, only patients with strong clinical suspicion of early MI following coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) undergo this invasive procedure. There is a clinical need for the development of safe and accurate non-invasive diagnostic approaches to assess the early coronary bypass graft occlusion and to predict the consequent MI. A new clinical approach for the identification of the early post-procedural graft occlusion in patients undergoing CABG surgery is the high-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) cut-off level. The peri-operative bypass occlusion will be assessed by a Coronary Computed Tomography (CCT) scan which is a widely available non-invasive approach that permits an accurate evaluation of coronary stenosis. This study is to evaluate the correlation between hs-cTn level as cardiac biomarker for ischemia and early graft occlusion as assessed by CCT in patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery.