Biomarker testing in patients with heart failure (HF) is rapidly expanding. With high-quality research indicating its diagnostic and prognostic capabilities, biomarkers are excellent adjuncts to manage patients with HF. Their superiority lies mainly in their reflection of ongoing pathophysiological events at a cellular level. Monitoring biomarker levels has been shown to provide incremental information on the progression of disease, thus allowing to better tailor treatment and management. Several biomarkers have gained attention in the past decade and continuing research demonstrates the specificity of each biomarker to be used on its own or in combination to improve diagnostic accuracy. This review will provide an insight into the role of such biomarkers, which are widely studied in the setting of HF so as to delineate their role in diagnosing, prognosticating, and titrating HF therapy.

Heart failure (HF) has proven to be a major burden on the health system. The continuing prevalence of the condition and its rising associated costs and care, has amplified the need for earlier diagnosis, better risk stratification and cost-effective treatment to cut rates of hospitalization. Biomarkers seem poised to undertake such tasks, with biomarker management of patients with HF quickly evolving over the past several years. Biomarker guided diagnosis and treatment has become vital, especially during the acute setting in which the majority of patients with HF, were initially present. An adequate assessment of risk requires a multi-marker approach to a given HF patient. Established markers including brain natriuretic peptide and NT-proBNP are a significant clinical aid to physicians, though their utility is limited. In the past few years, momentous effort has been put into the discovery of new biomarkers. These endeavors have led to the emergence of several capable and promising biomarkers for HF management including troponins, mid-regional pro-adrenomedullin, GDF-15, C-reactive protein, Galectin-3, IL-6, ST-2, neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin, copeptin and procalcitonin. This review will offer an insight into the novel biomarkers considered as the cutting-edge in the diagnosis and management of HF.

The historical role of European farming in Southern and Central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus exists in the Scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in Southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers' access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Yet, these propositions have so far not been systematically and empirically tested. This article is a first attempt to do that by analysing the 'wage-burden' European settler farmers faced. The wage-burden is identified by measuring wage shares (total amount paid in the form of wages as a share of total profits) on European farms in colonial Africa. Based on archival documents, we construct time-series for value of output, transportation costs, investments in agriculture, and wages paid for the European tobacco and tea sector in colonial Malawi. Our results contradict both previous research on settler colonialism in Africa and the historiography of Nyasaland. Our estimates show that settler farming did not collapse in the 1930s as commonly assumed. On the contrary, the value of production on both tobacco and tea farms increased significantly. And so did the settler farmers' capacity to capture the profits, which was manifested in a declining wage share over time. In contrast with previous research, we argue that the declining wage share cannot be explained by domestic colonial policies but rather through changes in regional migration patterns, and global commodity markets. Migration patterns had a significant impact on the supply of farm labour and global commodity markets influenced value of production. Market forces rather than colonial policies shaped the development trajectory of settler farming in Nyasaland.

African economic history has undergone impressive revitalization in the past decade. Much of the recent work is, quite naturally, inspired by developments in economic history at large, and increasingly -indirectly or directly -using markets as the organizing principle in understanding how economies evolve over time. More specifically, recent work assumes that markets create the possibility to use resources more efficiently, which, theoretically, enables economies to grow as long as institutions adjust and enable the population to exploit the arising opportunities. That is, the current works in African economic history are to a large extent grounded in Smithian growth models, labelled after Adam Smith's work on the mechanisms of long-term growth. This paper critically discusses the explanatory value of the Smithian growth models for understanding the long-term economic development in Africa. The latter is best described as recurrent growth episodes, and we argue that while Smithian models can account for initial periods of growth, they fail to explain why the growth was not sustained. We use the boom and busts of cocoa production in Ghana in the twentieth century as a case in point. We show that the decline in cocoa production was not caused by state policies distorting the functions of the markets, as the Smithian growth models suggest. Instead, the decline in production was an outcome of changes in the ecological and institutional conditions that caused the initial growth. The irony is that it was the initial growth in cocoa production that altered the conditions, making further growth in production impossible. We capture these changes -for the first time ever -by combining the concepts of forest rents and involutionary growth in an African case.

This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualise «colonial settlement» as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the «success» or «failure» of colonial settlement critically depended on colonial government policies arranging European farmer’s access to local land, but above all, local labour resources. These policies were shaped by the clashing interests of African farmers and European planters, in which colonial governments did not necessarily, and certainly not consistently, abide to settler demands, as is often assumed.