Impact of the highly sensitive cardiac troponin t (hsTnT) assay on the triage of emergency department (ED) patients

Background. Troponin is recognised as the gold standard for diagnosing myocardial infarction. In our 600-beds university hospital, the 4th generation TnT assay was recently replaced by the hsTnT that improvesthe analytical sensitivity lowering the cut-off to 15 ng/L. Methods. During the three-month audit evaluating the impact of hsTnT implementation, we focused on patients presenting to the ED by comparing triage of hsTnT positive patients with that of TnT positive patients examined in the same period one year before. Results. In the two evaluated periods, the same number of tests (1472 vs. 1465 for TnT and hsTnT, respectively) was spread on a slightly different number of patients (from 1019 to 958, -6.0%).TnT and hsTnT gave 18.5% and 45.3% positive results (P