Cambridge Heart announced today that study data published in the journal Clinical Research in Cardiology show the value of the Microvolt T-Wave Alternans (MTWA) test in identifying patients at risk of sudden cardiac death.
The multi-center PREVENT-SCD study evaluated 453 patients with cardiomyopathy and ejection fraction of 40% or lower from 38 institutions in Japan. The study followed 280 patients for an average of three years. The patients underwent non-invasive MTWA testing using the analytic spectral method. At a median follow-up time of 36 months, patients with an abnormal MTWA test were 4.4 times more likely to experience a life-threatening arrhythmia or sudden cardiac death than those with a normal test and were almost 8 times more likely to die of cardiac causes.
"The PREVENT-SCD trial confirms the predictive value of MTWA in patients with left ventricular dysfunction," said Ali Haghighi-Mood, president and CEO of Cambridge Heart. "These powerful results illustrate MTWA's utility in assessing the risk of SCD in a real-world population of cardiomyopathy patients, whether their disease is ischemic or non-ischemic in origin."
Haghighi-Mood recently told FierceMedicalDevices the MTWA test is important because it can help identify patients who might later experience ischemic events, as well as those at risk of sudden cardiac arrest. He added the patient population for moderate to high risk coronary artery disease is roughly 30 million to 40 million in the U.S. alone.
- check out the Cambridge Heart release