Use of Natriuretic Peptides in the Emergency Department and the ICU

The clinical importance of a specific disease marker is related to the overall importance of the disease or biological signal it quantifies, the availability of alternative methods to reliably diagnose the disease and quantify disease severity, and, of course, the performance of the marker. Natriuretic peptides, as quantitative markers of cardiac stress and heart failure, owe their clinical importance to the fact that heart failure is a major public health problem, the uncertainty in the clinical diagnosis and management of heart failure, and to their excellent diagnostic and prognostic utility [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].