Serum S-100 Protein in Acute Stroke

To the Editor: We read with interest the work of Missler et al1 and Buttner and colleagues2 and agree with both sets of researchers on the need for reliable, noninvasive markers of neuronal damage following acute stroke. Such markers may allow prognostication of future clinical outcome and may be useful in acute therapy trials as surrogate markers of efficacy.However, neither study cited our publication on serum S-100 protein levels in acute stroke,3 4 a study that examined 81 patients (68 with ischemic stroke and 13 with hemorrhagic stroke) within 48 hours of stroke ictus and compared them with 51 age-, race-, and gender-matched control subjects.3 As with both recent papers in Stroke , we found significantly higher serum S-100 protein levels in the stroke population than in the control group. Furthermore, the highest S-100 protein levels were seen in the hemorrhagic stroke group, and differentiation between the two stroke populations almost reached statistical significance. We also performed a temporal study (24, 48, 72, and 96 hours …