Review Article Copeptin Testing in Acute Myocardial Infarction: Ready for Routine Use?

Copyright © 2015 Sebastian Johannes Reinstadler et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Suspected acute myocardial infarction is one of the leading causes of admission to emergency departments. In the last decade, biomarkers revolutionized themanagement of patients with suspected acute coronary syndromes. Besides their pivotal assistance in timely diagnosis, biomarkers provide additional information for risk stratification. Cardiac troponins I and T are the most sensitive and specificmarkers of acutemyocardial injury.Nonetheless, in order to overcome the remaining limitations of thesemarkers, novel candidate biomarkers sensitive to early stage of disease are being extensively investigated. Among them, copeptin, a stable peptide derived from the precursor of vasopressin, emerged as a promising biomarker for the evaluation of suspected acute myocardial infarction. In this review, we summarize the currently available evidence for the usefulness of copeptin in the diagnosis and risk stratification of patients with suspected acute myocardial infarction in comparison with routine biomarkers. 1