Study Identifies Potential New Marker For Heart Failure Diagnosis, Prognosis....Harvard- Mass General Hospital...MORE
A collaborative study by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the University Hospital of Maastricht, The Netherlands, has identified a new candidate biomarker for heart failure with the potential of further improving the challenging task of diagnosing and predicting outcomes for patients with symptoms of heart failure, primarily shortness of breath. In the September 19 Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the investigators report that elevated blood levels of galectin-3, an inflammatory protein, can help diagnose heart failure and identify patients at risk of dying within 60 days. Another potential marker, apelin, did not prove to be useful.

"Heart failure is one of the most difficult diagnoses to make accurately, since it has numerous, varied symptoms, and signs that indicate heart failure are hard to detect," says James Januzzi Jr., MD, of the MGH Cardiology Division, the paper's co-lead author and principal investigator of the 2005 PRIDE Study, from which the data for the current report was generated. "It also is notoriously difficult to identify those heart failure patients at the highest risk of death, so biomarker screening to assist with prognostication has been studied and increasingly implemented over the past several years.............."