A groundbreaking blood test priced at just £5 has the potential to accurately predict an individual’s risk of heart attacks and strokes over the next decade, according to pioneering research. The test, which looks for a protein called troponin present in heart muscle cells, could be conducted alongside routine cholesterol checks at GP practices, providing a new opportunity to save lives.
High-sensitivity troponin blood tests, commonly used in hospitals to diagnose heart attacks, can now also help identify silent ongoing heart damage, signaling future cardiovascular disease risk. The study, featured in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, reveals that individuals with elevated troponin levels are more likely to experience a heart attack or stroke within the next 10 years.
The research, which analyzed anonymized health data from over 62,000 participants across 15 studies in Europe and North America, shows that integrating troponin results with traditional risk factors offers predictions up to four times more accurate than those based solely on cholesterol levels. Notably, the troponin test proved highly effective in categorizing danger in the 35% of individuals currently assessed as having intermediate cardiovascular risk, leading to the reclassification of up to 8% of them to high risk.
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Significantly, the British Heart Foundation (BHF), which financed the study, suggests that the test’s integration could potentially prevent a substantial number of serious cardiovascular incidents, including heart attacks and strokes, by identifying those in need of preventative treatments such as statins.
Professor Anoop Shah, the study’s lead author and professor of cardiovascular medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, emphasizes the test’s potential to enhance risk prediction accuracy and ensure that high-risk individuals receive the necessary preventative treatment. Professor Bryan Williams, chief scientific and medical officer at the BHF, acknowledges the importance of incorporating this blood test into current risk prediction models to identify more people at higher risk and minimize the occurrence of heart attacks and strokes.