Primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in people with lupus could be possible with the help of a simple biomarker.

Dr Kim Sacre from the Bichat Hospital in Paris, France and colleagues discovered that lupus patients with no symptoms of heart disease but detectable high sensitivity cardiac troponin (HS-cTnT) in their blood (> 3 ng/L) had an 8-fold increased risk of having atherosclerosis.

“The results of our study raise the possibility that this easily measured biomarker could be introduced into clinical practice as a more reliable way of evaluating cardiovascular risk in lupus patients,” Dr Sacre told the conference.

The research team will now aim to confirm their findings in a larger cohort of patients over a longer follow-up period as well as track the occurrence of cardiovascular events.

The study involved 63 patients with lupus who had no signs of heart disease and were considered to be at low-risk and 18 control patients.  Serum HS-cTnT concentration was detectable (i.e. > 3 ng/L) in 37 (58.7%) SLE patients and 6 (33.3%) controls (p=0.057).

Interestingly, 87% of SLE patients with carotid plaques, but only 42.5% in SLE patients without plaques (p<0.001), had a detectable HS-cTnT.

Conversely, 54.5% SLE patients with a detectable HS-cTnT, but only 11.5% with an undetectable HS-cTnT (p<0.001), had a carotid plaque.