bloody easy. A new technique could enable doctors to monitor the artery with a blood test.
Checking clogged arteries could someday be as simple as a blood test. Researchers report that a relatively quick and inexpensive analysis of chemicals in the blood can reliably detect the disease and indicate its seriousness.
coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, results when fats clog the arteries that supply blood to the heart. Currently, patients doctors screen for the disease by checking a laundry list of risk factors, including high cholesterol, smoking and obesity. But they can not be sure until they donned a catheter into the coronary arteries and to take X-ray films that reveal their status. This procedure, called angiography is invasive time-consuming, and expensive. Biochemist David Grainger of Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK, and his team say they have found an effective alternative to a powerful technique borrowed from analytical chemistry.
The technique, called proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H NMR), the reflected light from a sample records placed in a magnetic field and zapped with radio waves. Any chemical has such a unique spectrum that digital emission footprint. The Grainger team sampled serum (blood with clotting cells) removed 36 people with coronary artery disease diagnosed by angiography and 30 healthy people. After analyzing the spectra with a statistics program, the team was able to diagnose the samples with an accuracy of 92%. Differences in the amount of lipoproteins - a type of fat - were the most significant indicators of the disease, they found
The team also demonstrated that 1 H NMR can indicate the severity of the disease: They attributed precisely 76 other patients. to one of three categories - benign (an affected artery), moderate (two arteries in difficulty), and large (all three coronary arteries blocked). These results, as well as the ease with which the technique can be done, make NMR suitable for clinical use, the team argues in the November 25 issue Nature Medicine .
"This study is a beautiful integration of analytical chemistry, clinical medicine and biostatistics" said chemist and toxicologist Mark Viant the University of California, Davis. The technique capture huge amounts of data that can be exploited for new ideas on how the diseases progress, says toxicologist Marion Miller, also at UC Davis.
Related Sites
Bio David Grainger
Marion Miller website
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