Prevalence of autoantibodies to cardiac troponin T in healthy blood donors

Recently, human IgG reactive with cardiac troponin (cTn) I has received attention as a potential cause of false-negative results in some immunoassays for that antigen (1) and was further suggested as a possible contributor to idiopathic cardiomyopathy (2, 3) and poor outcome after myocardial infarction (4). Briefly, frozen plasma and serum samples from apparently healthy blood donors (n=467), all of which had been approved for research use by the institutional review board, were obtained from the Abbott Laboratories specimen bank and thawed at 2-8 °C before use.