All patients had blood sampled for prospective assessment of the prognostic value of traditional risk markers including albumin and CRP, and cardiac biomarkers BNP, NT-proBNP, TnT and TnI. Patients were closely monitored clinically. Mortality and morbidity outcomes were documented for a national morbidity and mortality database. Stored samples were subsequently used to measure TnT with a new high-sensitivity assay.
After a median of 30 months from blood collection, NT-proBNP was the most powerful predictor of all-cause mortality, along with albumin. After a median of 46.7 months the new high-sensitive TnT assay was the only cardiac biomarker predictive of all-cause mortality. TnT was detectable in all dialysis patients using the high-sensitive TnT assay with a cut-point of 24.15 ng/L below which all patients survived.
The new hs-TnT is the most powerful biomarker for prognostic classification for all-cause mortality of all the commonly used biomarkers for our renal-dialysis population. Our study also suggests that cardiac biomarkers have a different prognostic ability for different time frames with NT-proBNP being a better predictor for early mortality and troponin for later mortality.