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Myocardial Infarction

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Vol 12 No 2

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Detecting myocardial infarction in critical illness using screening troponin measurements and ECG recordings
Wendy Lim1, Paula Holinski1, PJ Devereaux1,2, Andrea Tkaczyk2, Ellen McDonald2, France Clarke2, Ismael Qushmaq3, Irene Terrenato4, Holger Schunemann2,4, Mark Crowther1 and Deborah Cook1,2
1Department 2Department

of Medicine, McMaster University, Canada of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Canada 3Department of Medicine, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 4Department of Epidemiology, Italian National Cancer Institute Regina Elena, Rome, Italy Corresponding author: Deborah Cook, debcook@mcmaster.ca Received: 6 Dec 2007 Revisions received: 22 Jan 2008 Accepted: 4 Mar 2008 Published: 4 Mar 2008 Critical Care 2008, 12:R36 (doi:10.1186/cc6815) This article is online at: http://ccforum.com/content/12/2/R36 © 2008 Lim et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract
Introduction To use screening cardiac troponin (cTn) measurements and electrocardiograms (ECGs) to determine the incidence of elevated cTn and of myocardial infarction (MI) in patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU), and to assess whether these findings influence prognosis. This is a prospective screening study. Materials and methods We enrolled consecutive patients admitted to a general medical-surgical ICU over two months. All patients underwent systematic screening with cTn measurements and ECGs on ICU admission, then daily for the first week in ICU,

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