Troponin Test Assesses Cardiac Risk

A troponin I test designed to help diagnose patients suspected of having a heart attack and cardiac muscle damage can now be used to determine a patient's future risk of a heart attack and cardiac muscle damage. The new indication has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The test, AccuTnI, is the product of Beckman Coulter, Inc. (Fullerton, CA, USA; www.beckmancoulter.com) and can be run on the company's Access and Access 2 immunoassay systems as well as its new Synchron clinical system. The test provides results in about 12 minutes, making it one of the fastest cardiac tests on the market, says Beckman Coulter.

"Patients with unstable coronary disease and elevated troponin levels have an increased risk of a recurrent heart attack or even death,” said David A. Morrow, M.D., M.P.H., of the cardiovascular division at Brigham & Women's Hospital (Boston, MA, USA; www.brighamandwomens.org), one of several research sites that evaluated the performance of the AccuTnI. "Risk stratification using troponin testing involves categorizing patients with unstable coronary disease into high and lower risk groups, helping us to identify those patients who are likely to benefit most from more-aggressive therapy, such as early invasive procedures.”

"In our clinical study involving more than 1,700 patients, Beckman Coulter's AccuTnI correctly identified more patients than other troponin tests used in the study,” noted the study's co-author, Per Venge, M.D., Ph.D, professor of medicine at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.




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