Serum Cardiac Troponins I and T in Early Posttraumatic Rhabdomyolysis

Troponin T was proposed as an aid in the diagnosis of myocardial infarction in 1989 (1). However, the first generation of commercially available troponin T assays yielded false-positive results in patients with severe skeletal muscle injury because of an unspecific binding of skeletal muscle troponin T to the wall of the test tube. Indeed, the second detection antibody in the test showed marked cross-reactivity with skeletal muscle troponin T. Another protein of the troponin complex, cardiac troponin I (cTnI), recently became commercially available and was shown to be highly specific for cardiac muscle (2). cTnI can be used for the diagnosis of myocardial damage in patients with posttraumatic rhabdomyolysis (3). More recently, a cardiac-specific, second-generation assay for troponin T (cTnT) was developed by using a second completely cardiac-specific antibody (4). We report here the comparison of the results obtained for cTnI and cTnT in patients with early posttraumatic rhabdomyolysis …