Blood test predicts cardiac events and death in hear...( coronary heart disease. In the general...)

coronary heart disease. "In the general population, the incidence of heart disease is so low relative to the incidence in heart disease patients that you get many more false positive results than true positives, which really lowers the value of the test," she says. "It's much better at predicting risk in a population with a high incidence of heart disease."

Whooley also notes that, even among heart patients, the value of the test is limited "because all of the therapies available to prevent cardiovascular events should already be used among these patients. The best it can do is help identify candidates for more aggressive therapy."

She says that one additional step for researchers is to see "whether there are therapeutic interventions that still remain to be developed that might prevent heart patients with elevated BNP from doing worse."

Patients in the current study were all enrolled in the Heart and Soul Study, a multi-year prospective study of one thousand heart patients directed by Whooley that is designed to investigate whether depression predicts heart disease. "Because the Heart and Soul Study measures heart disease so carefully, our data set has become extremely valuable for a wide range of cardiovascular studies, many of which have nothing to do with our original hypothesis," Whooley says. "This study is just one example."

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Contact: Steve Tokar
steve.tokar@ncire.org
415-221-4810 x5202
University of California - San Francisco
9-Jan-2007

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