Study on blood coagulant/fibrinolytic activity at plasma and monocytic levels in coronary heart disease patients with blood-stasis syndrome of traditional chinese medicine

Objective: To explore and compare the changes of coagulant/fibrinolytic activity in coronary heart disease (CHD) patients with Blood Stasis Syndrome of TCM and evaluate the roles of these changes.Methods: Eighty patients of CHD were divided into two groups by Syndrome Differentiation of TCM, the Blood-Stasis (BS) group (30 cases) and the non-Blood-Stasis (NBS) group (50 cases, including 27 cases of Phlegm-Dampness Syndrome and 23 cases of Qi-Stagnation Syndrome); and 20 healthy persons were enrolled as normal control group. Tissue type plas-minogen activator (t-PA) and its inhibitor (PAI-1) in plasma and in human peripheral blood monocyte cell (PBMC), as well as the procoagulant activity (PCA) in PBMC were measured by chromogenic substrate method.Results: The plasma PAI-1 activity and PCA of PBMC in the BS group were significantly higher than those in the NBS group and the normal control group (P<0.01). PAI-1 activity of PBMC in the two groups of CHD patients was higher than those in the normal control group significantly (P<0.01), but no significant difference was found between the BS group and the NBS group (P > 0.05). The difference of plasma t-PA activity between the two groups of CHD was insignificant. The PBMC t-PA activity in the BS group was lower than that in the NBS and normal control groups (P<0.01).Conclusion: In the CHD patients with BS, the PBMC PCA was increased and the fibrinolytic activity at both plasma and monocyte levels lowered significantly, these changes in coagulant/fibrinolytic activity may be the important pathologic factors in forming BS which suggests that CHD patients with BS were in the prothrombotic state.