Background: Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) is an important chemokine at multiple phases of atherosclerosis in animals, but human studies are few and inconsistent. The aim of this study is to investigate the association of serum MCP-1 with all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality among coronary artery disease (CAD) patients and determine whether this biomarker can add secondary prognostic value to standard risk predictors.
Methods: MCP-1 was measured at baseline in 1411 CAD patients who were 40-85 years of age. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to estimate the association of MCP-1 levels with death risk.
Results: During a median follow-up of 3.3 years, 117 deaths were recorded, 88 of which were due to CVD. The multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios across tertiles of MCP-1 were 1.51 (95% confidence intervals [CI] 0.89-2.58), 1.00, and 2.11 (95% CI 1.31-3.40) for all-cause mortality, and 1.50 (95% CI 0.80-2.81), 1.00, and 2.21 (95% CI 1.27-3.87) for CVD mortality. The addition of serum MCP-1 to the fully adjusted model increased the C-index by 0.009 (p<0.0001) for all-cause mortality and 0.008 (p<0.0001) for CVD mortality and significantly improved the predictive ability by 12.1% (P = 0.006) on all-cause mortality and 12.6% (P = 0.003) on CVD mortality using the net reclassification improvement method.
Conclusions: Both lower and higher MCP-1 levels are associated with an increased risk of all-cause and CVD mortality among CAD patients. More research is needed to confirm its clinical relevance.