Roche Test Diagnoses Heart Attack in One Hour

Jan. 13, 2016

Results from the TRAPID-AMI1 clinical study have been published online by the Annals of Emergency Medicine, confirming a novel approach for a more rapid diagnosis of heart attack in patients with acute chest pain. According to a press release, the strategy is based on the cardiac troponin T high-sensitivity test from Roche and reduces the observation time needed to rule-in or rule-out a heart attack from three to six hours to just one hour.

“Thanks to this new approach, we can now shorten the time to heart attack diagnosis for millions of patients presenting in emergency rooms with acute chest pain all over the world,” says Christian Mueller, professor of cardiology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, one of the study’s principal investigators.

Troponin is a heart muscle protein that is released into the blood stream during a heart attack. A limitation of the earlier generations of blood tests was the time required to detect the troponin release, sometimes requiring up to six hours with less sensitive troponin tests, the release said.

The European Society of Cardiology adopted this accelerated diagnostic concept at their annual meeting held in London (UK) in August 2015. Their new clinical practice guidelines (2015 ESC NSTEMI) now support the 1-hour diagnostic algorithm with high-sensitive troponin testing validated in the TRAPID-AMI study.

Read the full release