Improving a simple blood test could prevent unnecessary treatment for heart attacks.
The STRIPE-MI study, led by Southampton cardiologist Professor Nick Curzen, aims to see if more suspected heart attack patients can get the right treatment by improving the troponin test, a standard blood test for heart damage.
To do this, the team will combine data from the Office for National Statistics with the medical health records of 800 patients admitted with a suspected heart attack to University Hospital Southampton between April 2014 and December 2015.
Using these data, they hope to define specific test results that can be reliably associated with different causes of heart damage.
Detecting heart damage
When the heart is damaged during a heart attack, the protein troponin is released into the bloodstream, and it is this change that is detected by the test. However, raised troponin isn’t always the result of a heart attack, sometimes resulting from other heart problems such as fast heart rhythms.
Due to a current inability to distinguish these patients, many undergo a series of unnecessary and sometimes risky procedures used to treat the damage caused by a heart attack. At present there are no guidelines on how patients who have not suffered heart attack but yet have a raised troponin level should be managed, this study aims to evaluate the different treatment strategies clinicians currently use and what effect it has on patients.
Improving the test
In treating heart attacks, there is rarely time to confirm the cause of the damage, resulting in many patients with other heart problems undergoing potentially risky procedures for treating heart attack damage.
The study aims to identify ways the interpretation of the troponin test, a standard blood test to determine whether a person has had a heart attack, can be improved so more patients get the right treatment.
A troponin level above 40ng/L is a positive result in this test, and is considered to indicate significant damage to the heart and a likely heart attack - but the severity of heart attacks can cause much higher levels than this.
The researchers think that there could be a sliding scale of excess troponin levels, increasing according to cause, with heart attacks at the extreme end. By exploring links between patient’s actual heart conditions and their recorded troponin levels through medical records, they hope to define key ranges of troponin concentrations linked with differing causes of heart damage.
Through this, they want to help ensure fewer patients undergo treatment for a heart attack they never had, and to improve early detection and treatment of other heart conditions.
Posted on Tuesday 14 February 2017