A new blood test could determine a patient's risk of heart attack by detecting specific cell markers.
The new method identifies circulating endothelial cells (CECs). The trials were able to distinguish patients going through heart attack recovery from healthy patients using this method, a Scripps Research Institute news release reported.
The researchers plan to test the technique on patients who display symptoms of heart attack risk but haven't experienced a cardiac event.
"The goal of this paper was to establish evidence that these circulating endothelial cells can be detected reliably in patients following a heart attack and do not exist in healthy controls-which we have achieved," TSRI Associate Professor Peter Kuhn, who led the study, said. "Our results were so significant relative to the healthy controls that the obvious next step is to assess the usefulness of the test in identifying patients during the early stages of a heart attack."
Endothelial cells line artery walls; in the past they have been linked to heart attacks if found in the bloodstream. Medical experts believe the cells are present when "plaque builds up, ruptures and ulcerates"; this can cause dangerous inflammation in the arteries.
This type of inflammation can cause blood clots which restrict arterial flow and can eventually lead to a heart attack.
The Endothelial cell-detecting procedure was dubbed the High-Definition Circulating Endothelial Cell (HD-CEC) assay. It successfully detected the cells in 79 patients who had experienced a heart attack.
The assay detected these heart attack-associated cells by pinpointing their morphological features and how they reacted with certain antibodies. The team also used the assay on 25 healthy patients seven that were being treated for vascular disease.
"The assay was able to identify CECs by their morphological features and their reactions with specific antibodies. The cells were shown to be significantly elevated in the heart attack patients compared to the healthy controls and were detected with high sensitivity and high specificity," the news release reported.
The method was also compared with an FDA approved tumor cell detection method called CellSearch®. The HD-CEC method was found to have a higher specificity for CEC detection.
"Our assay effectively analyzes millions of cells, which is more work but guarantees that you are analysing all of the potential cells," Kuhn said.
