Abstract
Heart failure affects over 5 million people in the United States. Its rising prevalence and the limited supply of donor hearts is increasing the use of mechanical cardiac support with the implantation of continuous-flow ventricular assist devices (CF-VAD). Patients with CF-VAD implants are at risk of complications, specifically adverse hemostatic events such as nonsurgical bleeding and thrombosis. Development of a pump thrombus requires clinical intervention and/or surgical replacement significantly increasing the risk of patient morbidity and mortality. Identification of biomarkers for these events could improve current risk assessment models, subsequent treatment, and quality of life prognoses for VAD-implanted patients. The standard means for identifying thrombus in VAD patients is currently limited to monitoring levels of lactate dehydrogenase (>2× upper limit of normal), which is incapable of predicting a future event, but describes the risk of a present thrombus. Surface-enhanced laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry is a technique used to identify biomarkers. In this study, 3 groups of unique peaks were identified in plasma from patients with left ventricular assist devices: 8.1-kDa, 11.7-kDa, and a 15.2-/16.1-kDa pair. Unique correlations were found for each peak, respectively, with microparticles (MPs) and MP procoagulant activity, C-reactive protein, and MP-tissue factor. Furthermore, the use of 8.1-kDa peaks may be able to differentiate thrombotic events from other hemostatic events.