A simple blood test costing less than $10 could prevent hundreds of heart attacks and other adverse cardiac events per year.
Troponin is a protein found in heart muscle cells that if detected in the blood stream means the heart has been damaged in some way: a key indicator of cardiovascular disease risk with greater predictive power than cholesterol levels.
A troponin detection test that can be administered along with other simple blood tests could alert hundreds of patients to their higher risk of heart attack and stroke, allowing them to alter their lifestyle or even start taking statins, in advance of an adverse cardiac event.
The concept was demonstrated in a paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The authors showed that adding cardiac troponin levels to existing risk factors such as smoking status, cholesterol, diabetes presence, and blood pressure increased the predictive powers of these screenings—done after CVD events or in advance of a statin prescription.
In fact, in their study of 62,000 Britons with a 15-year follow-up, one additional CVD event would be prevented for every 408 and 473 individuals screened when troponin was added, a result of troponin being a good indicator of so-called “silent” heart damage that could lead to a CVD event in the future.
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The study also found adding troponin tests meant that up to 8% of people classified as intermediate risk were changed to high-risk.
“Troponin, even in the normal range, is a powerful indicator of silent heart muscle damage,” said Anoop Shah, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author on the study.
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“As such, the test provides an extra layer of information that we can use to boost our accuracy when predicting people’s risk. We want to identify as many high-risk people as possible, so that no one misses out on the opportunity to get preventative treatment.”
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