Cardiovascular disease claims around 12 million lives each year, a figure which equates to nearly 30% of all deaths worldwide.
In New Zealand cardiovascular disease accounts for almost 40% of all deaths and on an annual basis costs the country in excess of $935 million. The huge financial and human costs have seen five of the 13 principal objectives in the New Zealand Health Strategy concentrated on reducing the impact and severity of these diseases.
So far in the battle against it, scientists have succeeded in uncovering many of the contributing factors for heart disease, such as smoking, obesity, high blood cholesterol from saturated fats, but the diagnostic tools for evaluating cardiovascular risk and arterial health have remained expensive and problematic.
Researchers at AUT's Institute of Biomedical Technologies (IBTec) have been developing non-invasive technology which is allowing them to use the body's arterial wave patterns as an indicator for cardiovascular risk.
One researcher has described it as having the ability to translate the "language" the arteries are using to "speak".
Several models have been developed and simulated to study how the waves travel through human arteries, and to identify how these patterns of movement change with normal aging and with diseased conditions. Clinical trials are underway to validate some of these models.
IBTec Director Professor Ahmed Al-Jumaily says traditional diagnostic techniques like catheter angiography (where a catheter is passed through an artery) are invasive and carry risks for the patient.
"Some of the non-invasive alternatives such as MRI and ultrasound are expensive and require lengthy procedures."
Professor Al-Jumaily says IBTec's diagnostic approach is based on computational fluid dynamics and how this can be applied to understand patterns in arterial pulse waves.
Currently IBTec is concentrating on the diagnosis of two of the cardiovascular conditions that contribute to the massive death toll - atherosclerosis and aneurysms.
Atherosclerosis is the thickening of the artery wall as a result of a build-up of fatty materials; an aneurysm results when weakened artery walls cannot sustain the normal blood flows - a bulge forms in the artery which can then burst causing dangerous bleeding in the body.
In an individual suffering from atherosclerosis or the precursors to an aneurysm, Professor Al-Jumaily says the arterial wave patterns are notably altered.
Working alongside Pulsecor and international research collaborators, IBTec is honing its technology to ultimately allow health professionals to diagnose critical changes in arterial blood flows before the patient is faced with a medical crisis.
Ongoing developments to the technology will allow users of the diagnostic tool to include information on the patient's height, weight, gender and hereditary factors which will then be looked at in conjunction with arterial wave patterns to create an accurate picture of the individual's risk for cardiovascular conditions such as atherosclerosis and aneurysms.
"Many, many lives could be saved if people could get help sooner, before they suffered an aneurysm or an attack."
Click here to find out more.