Heart attacks and strokes are major cardiovascular events, and are traumatic for patients and their families. Every year in the U.S. around 785,000 people have a first heart attack, and 470,000 who have had one (or more) heart attacks go on to have another, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). BG Medicine's blood biomarker-based test CardioSCORE is designed to detect the people who are at a high risk of these cardiovascular events.
Risk scales such as the Framingham Risk Score are commonly used to assess patients for their risk of suffering a heart attack, stroke or other major cardiovascular events, but sometimes they can miss vulnerable people. BG Medicine's BioImage study was designed to assess the use of CardioSCORE, previously known as AMIPredict, in combination with the Framingham Risk Score, and see if it would be more effective than scoring alone. CardioSCORE measures 7 protein biomarkers in the blood.
The BioImage study involved 6,600 people with no history of cardiovascular disease from Illinois and Florida. The participants were evaluated for risk and then monitored for two and a half years. Of the people who had a major cardiovascular event within one year or two years, the combination of CardioSCORE and the Framingham Risk Score had identified 60% and 54% of them as high-risk respectively, compared with 28% and 26% using the Framingham Risk Score alone.
"A diagnostic blood test capable of identifying high risk patients who would otherwise not be identified using traditional risk scales, particularly in the near-term, could potentially enable optimized preventative treatment and save many lives," said Dr. Aram Chobanian, president emeritus of Boston University and dean emeritus of Boston University School of Medicine.
Knowing who is at risk and treating them or getting them to change their lifestyles could help prevent major cardiovascular events and reduce lost productivity, healthcare costs, deaths and disability.
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