Comparison of Serum Soluble Corin Levels among Stroke Subtypes

Abstract

Background: Serum soluble corin was decreased not only in some cardiac diseases, but also in stroke. Cardiogenic sources play a critical role in ischemic stroke. Serum soluble corin level in stroke subtypes has not been studied. Here we aimed to study corin level in 4 stroke subtypes: hemorrhagic, thrombotic, embolic and lacunar stroke.Methods: 116 hemorrhagic stroke, 320 thrombotic stroke patients, 48 embolic stroke patients and 102 lacunar stroke patients were studied. Serum soluble corin was measured and some conventional risk factors of stroke were collected. We compared corin level among different types of stroke in men and women respectively. Results: Serum soluble corin level was significantly higher in ischemic stroke patients than hemorrhagic stroke patients in men (log-corin, mean±SD:7.53±0.34 vs. 7.42±0.28; P =0.013) and women (log-corin, mean±SD:7.22±0.27 vs. 7.12±0.31; P = 0.044). Then we studied serum soluble corin in subtypes of ischemic stroke. Unadjusted analysis failed to show a significant difference in logtransformed serum soluble corin among different ischemic stroke subtypes in both men and women. However, after adjustment for the covariables, the mean level of log-transformed serum soluble corin was significantly increased in embolic stroke patients compared with other subtypes in men (P <0.05). In women, embolic stroke patients also had the highest mean level of log-transformed serum soluble corin but with no significant difference. After excluding patients with a history of coronary heart disease, the mean level of serum soluble corin was still the highest in embolic stroke patients among men and women however with no significance.Conclusions: Serum soluble corin was higher in ischemic stroke than hemorrhagic stroke and the highest in embolic stroke. Our findings indicated that corin may be a candidate biomarker used in the differentiate diagnosis of embolism from the heart.