Developing a new, low-cost blood test to diagnose heart failure earlier, outside of hospital, and in the community, enabling patients to receive more personalised care, reducing costs and hospital admissions.
Device
Over 1 million people in the UK are estimated to have heart failure (HF), a serious long-term condition that is caused by the heart not pumping blood as well as it should. People with HF often experience breathlessness, fatigue, and worsening of other symptoms, resulting in over 100,000 hospital admissions each year. HF is the leading cause of hospitalisation in the UK, accounting for 5% of all NHS emergency admissions, and 2% of NHS hospital bed-days.
Most HF diagnoses are made in hospital, often when a patient’s symptoms have become severe, and the heart has become too weak to pump blood around the body. Current tests for HF include echocardiograms, chest x-rays, and blood tests, which are often expensive, slow, and too complex to perform outside of a hospital. Therefore, there’s an urgent need for a simpler, reliable, and low-cost method to diagnose and monitor HF outside of hospital, and into the community. Earlier diagnosis of HF could enable patients to receive personalised critical care sooner.
Professor Damion Corrigan and his team at the University of Strathclyde aim to develop a new type of blood test to support the diagnosis and monitoring of heart failure outside of hospital; that is simple to use, affordable, and reliable. Instead of using large laboratory machines, this approach uses small electrical sensors in a new device made using low-cost equipment to detect proteins in the blood that indicate that heart is not functioning properly. This research will test the accuracy of this new device to ensure that it can reliably diagnose the early signs of HF.
This test has the potential to drastically transform how HF – one of the UK’s largest health problems, is diagnosed and managed. Earlier diagnosis of the condition would enable patients to receive more personalised, targeted care to improve their quality of life. A shift towards community management of HF would reduce hospital admissions and enable patients to receive care quicker and more comfortably. Excitingly, the technology used in this new test could also be adapted for use in detecting other heart conditions, improving diagnosis and care across the spectrum of heart disease.
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