[Ranolazine in the treatment of chronic stable angina]. / La Ranolazina nella terapia della angina cronica stabile.

Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death in Europe and in the US and angina is the most common symptom associated with stable coronary artery disease. Despite receiving optimal antianginal therapy, based on agents such as beta-blockers, calcium channel antagonists and nitrates, many patients continue to experience angina. Furthermore, the administration of these drugs is limited by adverse effects such as bradycardia or hypotension. Ranolazine is a new antianginal agent, recently approved as add-on therapy in patients with stable angina. This review will focus on its mechanism of action, tolerability, highlighting the clinical benefit coming from its use.

Statins and coronary artery disease: clinical evidence and future perspective.

Many clinical trials have demonstrated the beneficial effects of statins on cardiovascular risk, both in patients with history of coronary heart disease and in healthy subjects with risk factors, because of a significant reduction in acute coronary events. The introduction of more powerful statins in the market offered the opportunity to study whether an intensive lipid lowering treatment could yields even better cardiovascular outcomes than a moderate statin therapy and several clinical trial confirmed this hypothesis. Statins have also pleiotropic effect behind their lipid lowering function: they reduce inflammation, which plays an important role in the atherosclerotic process.

[High-sensitivity troponin assay: biochemistry and clinical application]. / Troponine ad alta sensibilita: dalla biochimica alle applicazioni cliniche.

Cardiac troponin is the marker of choice for the diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome. Its introduction in clinical practice consistently improved both sensibility and specificity as compared with other biomarkers, as creatin-chinase MB. However traditional troponin assays show some limits: the relatively long time elapsing between the onset of ischemia and the increase in serum concentration, and the difficulty in distinguishing ischemic from non ischemic damage. An earlier diagnosis could be obtained by adopting new high sensitivity troponin assays, with a coefficient of variation ≤10% at the 99° percentile of a reference healthy population, and capable of detecting circulating troponin in the most healty subjects. The difficulty in distinguishing ischemic from non ischemic harm can be overcome considering that only a rising and falling pattern can be attributed to ischemic harm. Further studies are needed to evaluate the prognostic role of low circulating troponin levels in healthy subjects and for properly fixing cut off values. Indeed biomarker increase has always to be considered in the specific clinical context.