Easing heart worries

A technique using radioactive tracers and computer imaging can screen out thousands of people who think they are having a heart attack but are not, says a study just released in the United States.

The finding could help to prevent unnecessary hospital admissions for about a quarter of a million people in the US each year, says the report from Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.

In the technique, called myocardial perfusion imaging, a small amount of radioactive tracer is injected into the body.

A special camera then detects radiation released by the substance to produce a computer image of the heart muscle, helping doctors to determine if the heart is receiving adequate blood flow.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was conducted at seven medical centres and community hospitals between July 1997 and May 1999 and involved 2475 adults who came to emergency departments with heart attack symptoms.

The patients received either standard care or the imaging technique. The study found that unnecessary hospital admissions were reduced by 20 per cent among the patients on whom imaging was used.

The researchers say more than six million people show up at US emergency rooms each year with chest pain or other heart attack symptoms.

Most are admitted for observation because initial electrocardiograms and other tests are inconclusive. But half of these will turn out to have been admitted unnecessarily, resulting in billions of dollars in wasted care.

James Udelson, one of the principal investigators of the study and associate chief of cardiology at the Tufts facility, said: "Our findings suggest that nearly 250,000 Americans could be spared the risks and costs of unnecessary hospitalisation and more invasive cardiac testing each year by simply adding the imaging test to the diagnostic protocol for chest pain."

The test used in the study was Cardiolite, from Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging, a subsidiary of Bristol-Myers Squibb.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Health