Heart Attack Barometer

The blood is a barometer of patient health, says Stanley Hazen, MD, PhD. He has devised a way to analyze blood that gives an accurate — and sometimes surprising — reading of a person’s risk for heart attack or death.

The technique goes much further than the standard measures from a blood sample, such as red blood cells, white blood cells and cholesterol. It analyzes 50,000 cells in the blood and applies a computer algorithm to identify patterns that predict who is at risk for a heart attack in the coming year.

Tested in almost 7,500 volunteers undergoing cardiac analysis, the technique did a better job than standard predictive measures, according to the report published in the July 6, 2010, issue of Circulation.

“It’s much stronger than any individual test,” says Dr. Hazen, Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention. The test was 78 percent accurate in predicting one-year risk for heart attack or death in patients. Traditional risk factors (age, gender, smoking status or cardiac history, for example) have an accuracy rate of 67 percent. Furthermore, when coupled with standard risk factors, the test changed risk classification for almost one in four participants. Some considered low-risk were actually high-risk and in need of aggressive preventive treatment, and others considered high-risk were in fact at low risk for heart attack or death.

The technique worked equally well in men and women, in smokers and nonsmokers, and in diabetics and nondiabetics.