BOSTON (Reuters) – New ultra-sensitive blood tests can rapidly detect when heart muscle is dying from a heart attack, even from the moment the patient arrives in the emergency room, according to two studies yesterday.
Two of the tests are made by Roche AG, one by Siemens AG and one is made by Abbott.
With older tests, it can be hours before telltale levels of the chemical cardiac troponin appear in the blood, delaying diagnosis and treatment. But the new tests work more quickly and more accurately, the studies found.
About 15 million people show up in emergency rooms in the US and Europe each year with symptoms of a heart attack, also known as a myocardial infarction.
Faster test could save time, billions of dollars and many lives by speeding treatment or helping doctors quickly determine if a heart attack is not causing a patient’s symptoms.
“The cost savings associated with this increase in early diagnostic accuracy might be substantial,” Dr. Tobias Reichlin of University Hospital Basel in Switzerland and colleagues wrote in one of the two reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Electrocardiograms, which measure the electrical activity of the heart, and a cardiac troponin test, which looks for the release of a protein unique to the heart, are the best measures of a heart attack. But it can take hours for troponin to get into the blood at levels high enough to be measured.
