A study that identifies new heart attack risk factors and supports the use of a blood test for detection in patients will be published in summary form in an upcoming issue of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists’ AACE Journal.
GD Biosciences developed the new blood test to help identify patients at risk of suffering a heart attack. Douglas Harrington, MD, CEO of GD Biosciences and clinical professor at USC Keck School of Medicine co-authored the study, “Inflammatory Biomarkers & Diabetes as Predictors of CHD in MESA,” with Americo Simonini, MD, attending cardiologist at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.
“There is a great need to correctly identify individuals with active yet undetected subclinical disease who are at risk of experiencing a coronary event, and for whom early intervention can help,” says Harrington. “Most heart attacks occur at the site of a non-obstructive lesion, and many patients do not have symptoms or abnormal lipids.”
Simonini says exercise testing or cardiac imaging diagnose higher-grade coronary stenosis but fail to identify many at-risk patients who are not showing any symptoms. “Obstructive coronary plaque is most often not the site of the cardiovascular event,” he explains. “This new test addresses this significant unmet clinical need.”
The research finds that the use of nine biomarkers and established clinical risk factors (including diabetic status) correlated with the underlying formation of unstable cardiac lesions and significantly improved identification of at-risk patients frequently missed by current methods. Results show that the novel protein-biomarker and clinical risk factor algorithm identified patients who went on to experience an acute coronary event. Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is the main cause of coronary artery disease mortality. Insulin resistance and diabetes are significant factors increasing risk of ACS. Learn more about technologies developed by GD Biosciences.
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