We compared the usefulness of four serum assays for classifying patients originally suspected of having an acute myocardial infarction. One of these is the long-used measurement of total creatine kinase (CK) activity. The other three are relatively new immunoassays: myoglobin by RIA, CK-BB by RIA, and CK-MB by immunoinhibition. When we evaluated test effectiveness with use of conventionally der...

BACKGROUND Serum creatine kinase-MB isoenzyme (CK-MB) is widely used as a marker of myocardial injury. We prepared recombinant human CK (r-hCK) MB isoenzyme and examined its potential for use as a control material for assay of CK-MB in serum. METHODS cDNAs encoding CK-M and CK-B subunits were inserted into the same plasmid vector, followed by transformation of Escherichia coli. The resulting ...

CK-MB values of >9 U/L and >4% CK-MB for potential MI. Because the modified calibration causes an “apparent” loss of CK-MB at the low end when compared with the KOdak calibration, we needed to determine whether the modified procedure retained good sensitivity. We analyzed a series of samples from two patients who displayed clinical evidence of MI 24 to 48 h before admission. The Hybritech proce...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Creatine kinase-MB (CK-MB) increases in some patients with stroke, with no clear evidence of an acute coronary syndrome. Its elevations have been suggested to represent a biological marker for stroke-related myocardial injury. Troponin T has superior sensitivity and specificity to CK-MB in revealing minor myocardial injury. Therefore, we studied troponin T levels after st...

Background: For patients with an increased risk of developing myopathy with statin treatment, guidelines recommend to measure CK before and 6-12 weeks after initiating statin treatment. Further, in clinical trials of statins, the number of patients experiencing elevated creatine kinase (CK) serum activity is commonly reported as a safety parameter. Usually exceeding the upper limit of normal (U...

BACKGROUND Creatine kinase (CK)-MB elevation after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has been associated with subsequent cardiac death. The patients at risk, the timing of risk, and potential treatment implications are uncertain. METHODS AND RESULTS Eight thousand, four hundred nine consecutive non- acute myocardial infarction patients with successful PCI and no emergency surgery or Q-...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate serum creatine kinase (CK) levels of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients and to explore the relationship between CK levels and the clinical characteristics and survival prognosis of ALS patients. METHODS We analyzed the CK levels of 185 ALS patients who underwent long-term follow-up. The relationship between CK levels and clinical features including sex, age, di...

BACKGROUND Elevation of serum creatine kinase MB fraction (CK-MB) after percutaneous coronary interventions has been associated with early and late mortality; however, the pathogenesis of CK-MB elevation is still unknown. We hypothesized that CK-MB elevation was related to atherosclerotic plaque burden as assessed by preintervention intravascular ultrasound (IVUS). METHODS AND RESULTS We stud...

Let k and ` be positive integers. With a graph G, we associate the quantity ck,`(G), the number of k-colorings of the edge set of G with no monochromatic matching of size `. Consider the function ck,` : N −→ N given by ck,`(n) = max {ck,`(G) : |V (G)| = n}, the maximum of ck,`(G) over all graphs G on n vertices. In this paper, we determine ck,`(n) and the corresponding extremal graphs for all l...