A new study suggests that a newly developed, highly sensitive blood test may aid doctors in ruling out heart attack for more than half the people who seek emergency room treatment for chest pain, philly.com reports.
Assessing whether a patient is having a heart attack requires prolonged stay in the emergency room or the need to undergo several testing procedures.
"Until now, there were no quick ways to rule out a heart attack within the emergency department," said the study's lead author, Dr. Anoop Shah, from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
"Over the last two decades, the number of hospital admissions due to chest pain has tripled. The overwhelming majority of these patients do not have a heart attack," Shah said.
Researchers said that the new test could reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and also lower health-care costs.
The new test can detect far lower blood levels of troponin than the standard tests. Troponin is a protein released when the heart muscle is damaged. A slight increase in this protein means some damage has occurred to the heart muscle, while a very high level indicates that the person had a heart attack.
With the help of this test, doctors would be able to double the number of low-risk patients who can be safely discharged from the emergency room.
"Use of this approach is likely to have major benefits for both patients and health-care providers," Shah said in a journal news release.
The study was published in the Oct. 8 issue of The Lancet.
