Biosensors for cardiac biomarkers detection: A review

The cardiovascular disease (CVD) is considered as a major threat to global health. Therefore, there is a growing demand for a range of portable, rapid and low cost biosensing devices for the detection of CVD. Biosensors can play an important role in the early diagnosis of CVD without having to rely on hospital visits where expensive and time-consuming laboratory tests are recommended. Over the last decade, many biosensors have been developed to detect a wide range of cardiac marker to reduce the costs for healthcare. One of the major challenges is to find a way of predicting the risk that an individual can suffer from CVD. There has been considerable interest in finding diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that can be detected in blood and predict CVD risk. Of these, C-reactive protein (CRP) is the best known biomarker followed by cardiac troponin I or T (cTnI/T), myoglobin, lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A(2), interlukin-6 (IL-6), interlukin-1 (IL-1), low-density lipoprotein (LDL), myeloperoxidase (MPO) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) has been used to predict cardiovascular events. This review provides an overview of the available biosensor platforms for the detection of various CVD markers and considerations of future prospects for the technology are addressed. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.