High-Sensitivity Cardiac Troponin and New-Onset Heart Failure: Could a Quantitative Meta-Analysis Be Performed for the C Index?

I have read the article by Evans and colleagues published in the JACC – Heart Failure with a great interest. The authors conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 67,063 patients with 4,165 incident heart failure events from 16 prospective studies. The results in this study suggest that serum high-sensitivity cardiac Troponin is strongly associated with the risk for incident heart failure beyond conventional risk factors. Certainly, Evans et al. have conducted a very valuable and exciting study. However, the authors mentioned that they were not able to perform a quantitative meta-analysis of the C index data in this study because some studies did not report confidence intervals (CI) for C indexes and their changes. Could the authors calculate a quantitative meta-analysis of the C index only using fully reported studies? This would provide a clearer view that many readers might be interested.