Circulating biomarkers of myocardial remodelling: current developments and clinical applications
Myocardial remodelling, entailing cellular and molecular changes in the different components of the cardiac tissue in response to damage, underlies the morphological and structural changes leading to cardiac remodelling, which in turn contributes to cardiac dysfunction and disease progression. Since cardiac tissue is not available for histomolecular diagnosis, surrogate markers are needed for evaluating myocardial remodelling as part of the clinical management of patients with cardiac disease. In this setting, circulating biomarkers, a component of the liquid biopsy, provide a promising approach for the fast, affordable and scalable screening of large numbers of patients, allowing the detection of different pathological features related to myocardial remodelling, aiding in risk stratification and therapy monitoring. However, despite the advances in the field and the identification of numerous potential candidates, their implementation in clinical practice beyond natriuretic peptides an