What happens when the ECG fails to detect a heart attack while you are being wheeled into the emergency of a hospital with chest pain?
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A faster, more accurate diagnosis of whether chest pain is caused by a heart attack would be better for patients and save the NHS money.
Study’s lead researcher Dr. Anoop Shah from the University of Edinburgh said that before the blood test, there was no quick way to find out whether a person admitted in emergency is having a heart attack. Troponin is a protein produced when the heart muscles are damaged.
The test constantly instructed medical professionals that will individuals weren’t having heart problems within one carnage try out, when compared to existing system which requires a couple of hours and a number of blood stream sampling, research scientists found.
The researchers found that a troponin threshold of 5 ng/L at presentation identified around two-thirds (61 per cent) of patients at very low risk of heart attack and may have been eligible for early, safe discharge – with a high negative predictive value of 99.6 per cent.
The 30-minute troponin test, which costs £5 or about $8, could possibly prevent around 400,000 people from being admitted at hospitals. “These findings could dramatically reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and provide substantial cost savings for healthcare providers”, affirmed study researchers.
Professor Jeremy Pearson, British Heart Foundation associate medical director, believes that the test is cost-efficient for the National Health Service. “In the last few years, this has become a go-to test to determine heart attacks”, says Cardiologist L. Krishna Mohan from Century Hospitals. The vast majority do not have a heart attack.
But they underlined the approach should not be applied without consulting a patient’s medical history and profile.
Normally, doctors will monitor the levels of troponin over a period of six to twenty-four hours, and if they are in the normal range after that period, it is unlikely that a heart attack is occurring.
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Scientists hope that the current testing procedure will now be altered, and that the highly-sensitive troponin test will soon be used everywhere in the UK.
