Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a pathological condition characterised by partial or complete narrowing of arteries of the lower or upper extremities, which appears as a result of arteriosclerosis. It is highly connected to the cardiovascular (CV) events; therefore, the patients with PAD are classified in the group at the highest risk of CV events. However, more than half of the people with the disease are underdiagnosed because it progresses slowly and asymptomatically. At the moment the only screening method to detect PAD is to measure the ankle-brachial index. Yet, we do not have available indicators to find out what the risk of appearing CV events at individual patients with PAD is. For this purpose, we studied serum galectin-3, which acts proatherogenic as a potential risk factor for the CV events. The research included 1117 patients from all over Slovenia. We determined the concertation of galectin-3 with the ELISA method in archived serum. By using statistical analysis, we defined the accuracy and the repeatability of the method first, then the clinical characteristics of the patients and we examined how the age and the concentration of galectin-3 are distributed. We also researched the gender and the age influence of the concertation of galectin-3. The next step was a comparison of the concentration of galectin-3 among patients with PAD or without it, as well as determining a relative risk for the disease. On the basis of the concentration of galectin-3, in the last part of the research we compared different groups of patients; patients who have experienced a CV event or not, how many CV events they have experienced, whether they experienced a minor or major CV event and the type of event they experienced. At the end, we also checked if galectin-3 predicts CV events or not. Based on our results we found out that the concentration of galectin-3 is higher in patients with PAD than in patients without it. In addition, patients with concentrations of galectin-3 higher than 4.5 ng/mL have 23 % higher relative risks for PAD than patients with lower concentrations. We did not confirm any connections between CV events and a concentration of galactin-3. In future a lot of researches can be expected in the field of prediction factors for cardiovascular events at patients with peripheral artery disease, because these patients are one of the most vulnerable groups being diagnosed and healed with a delay.
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