Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen, Germany, now offers two assays that help shorten the time to diagnosis for life-threatening heart attacks: the FDA-cleared High-Sensitivity Troponin I assays (TnIH) for the company’s Atellica IM and Advia Centaur XP/XPT in vitro diagnostic analyzers.

The assays aid in the early diagnosis of myocardial infarctions, commonly known as heart attacks. When a patient experiencing chest pain enters the emergency department, a physician orders a blood test to check for troponin. As blood flow to the heart is blocked, the heart muscle begins to die in as few as 30 to 60 minutes and releases troponin into the bloodstream.

Photo WuAlan

Alan Wu, MD, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

The high-sensitivity TnIH assays detect lower levels of troponin at significantly improved precision (at the 99th percentile) and enable physicians to identify smaller changes in a patient’s troponin level as repeat testing occurs. This design affords clinicians greater confidence in the results and the ability to measure slight, yet critical, changes to begin treatment.1,2 The TnIH assays meet the latest industry guidelines for high-sensitivity.

In the United States, chest pain is the cause of more than 8 million visits to emergency departments annually, but only 5.5% of those visits lead to serious diagnoses such as heart attacks.3 By providing data to properly triage patients sooner or to exclude myocardial infarctions, the Siemens Healthineers TnIH assays can help support testing initiatives tied to improving patient experience.

“Our emergency department is overcrowded with patients. If we can do a more efficient job at triaging patients to receive the proper level of care and to discharge the patients who do not need to stay in the emergency department, this will have a tremendous economic advantage for our healthcare system,” says Alan Wu, MD, chief of clinical chemistry and toxicology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

To learn more, visit Siemens Healthineers.

References

  1. Eggers K, Jernberg T, Ljung L, Lindahl B. High-sensitivity cardiac troponin-based strategies for the assessment of chest pain patients—a review of validation and clinical implementation studies. Clin Chem. 2018;64(7); doi: 10.1373/clinchem.2018.287342.
  1. Collinson P. High-sensitivity troponin measurements: challenges and opportunities for the laboratory and the clinician. Ann Clin Biochem. 2016;53(2):191–195; doi: 10.1177/0004563215619946.
  1. Hsia RY, Hale Z, Tabas JA. A national study of the prevalence of life-threatening diagnoses in patients with chest pain. JAMA Intern Med. 2016;176(7):1029–1032; doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.2498.