| Cardiac risk assessment is widely accepted clinically for individuals to predict future cardiovascular diseases. The common risk factors are personal health history, age, hereditary factors, weight, smoking habits, blood pressure, exercise history, diabetes, tobacco use, the lipid profile and the like. However, these established risk factors are largely absent in approximately half of those who develop cardiovascular events. Therefore, improvement in risk assessment has been aroused public's awareness.; Among the health risk factors, the well-known inflammation marker, C-reactive protein (CRP), has shown to have the leading power to be a strong independent predictor for future cardiovascular disease. It can also serve as a screening test to early specify the unidentified organisms which indicates there were bacteria or viruses successfully invading the human body at an early diagnostic phase. CRP is a valuable indicator in ensuring a correct diagnosis and determining the need for further treatment.; To make it clinically applicable and in the point-of-care testing settings, it is important to develop rapid diagnostic tests to assess its concentration in whole blood. For this CRP have been developed. The first one was designed for detection of heart attack and early assessment of cardiovascular disease risk simultaneously. The second one was for the differentiation between bacterial and viral infections in any unidentified infected cases.; Nowadays, another highly efficacious risk factor, homocysteine, is comprehensively believed to be for cardiovascular disorders clinically. However, there are no antibodies being specific for homocysteine available worldwide now. As a result, cortisol, another health risk marker for stress, was elaborated as a model for the development of a lateral flow assay based on the "immuno-threshold" technique. This novel lateral flow assay gave a signal DIRECTLY proportional to the analyte concentration in plasma samples with a performance time of less than 15 minutes. |
