Background: Acute kidney injury (AKI) predicts adverse outcomes after cardiac surgery. The accuracy of using changes in serum creatinine for diagnosis and grading of AKI is limited in the peri-operative cardiac surgical setting and AKI may be underdiagnosed due to haemodilution from cardiopulmonary bypass priming and the need for intra-operative and postoperative volume resuscitation.
Objectives: To determine whether the urinary biomarker neprilysin can be used as a marker for the early detection of AKI after cardiac surgery.
Design: Prospective, observational cohort study.
Setting: Austrian tertiary referral centre.
Patients: 96 Patients undergoing elective cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass.
Main outcome measures: Differences and discriminatory power of neprilysin levels early after cardiac surgery and on postoperative day 1 between patients with or without AKI, as defined by the Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes Group.
Results: AKI was found in 27% (n=26). The median neprilysin levels on postoperative day 1 were significantly higher in the AKI than in the non-AKI group, 4.0 [interquartile range (IQR): 2 to 6.25] vs. 2.0 ng ml [IQR: 1.0 to 4.5], P = 0.0246, respectively. In addition, the median neprilysin levels at the end of surgery were significantly different between both groups, 5.0 [IQR: 2.0 to 9.0] vs. 2.0 ng ml [IQR: 1.0 to 4.0], P = 0.0055, respectively. The discriminatory power of neprilysin for detecting early AKI corresponded to an area under the curve of 0.77 (95% confidence interval, 0.65 to 0.90).
Conclusion: Urinary neprilysin has potential as a biomarker for the early detection of AKI after cardiac surgery and has comparable discriminatory power to recently studied AKI biomarkers.
Trial registration: The trial was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03854825, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03854825).