Apollo Hospitals has become the first hospital chain in India to adopt Abbott’s High Sensitive Troponin-I blood test technology to screen otherwise healthy people for risk of developing heart diseases. The collaboration will focus on generating India-specific insights to enable physicians and patients to better manage cardiac outcomes. The registry would be a method of determining the risk of future cardiac events. The data would be used for risk-stratification to better determine cardiac risk. Abbott’s Troponin blood test can help doctors have a better understanding of their patients’ heart health and this technology could be used at hospitals across the country.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the biggest cause of mortality in India with nearly 25% of mortalities in the age group of 25-69 years attributed to CVDs. The condition also seems to affect Indians at least a decade earlier as compared to Europeans. With the aim of improving preventive care for cardiovascular disease in India, Apollo Hospitals and Abbott are working towards building the country’s first cardiac registry. As part of the registry, both the organisations will collect heart health data of patients visiting Apollo Hospitals across the country, including Troponin levels measured by Abbott’s high sensitive troponin-I blood test.
The data collected as part of the cardiac registry will help researchers better understand how heart disease impacts Indians, as well as patterns in cardiac risk that can help prevent CVDs and enable physicians and patients to manage their condition much more efficiently. According to the American Heart Association, setting up of cardiac registries in the US has helped hospitals and physicians improve the quality of care provided to the patients.
“Over the last decade, data has been central to improving the standard of care across the world. By setting up a national cardiac registry in India, we aim to collect invaluable data that would enable us improve cardiac care and save a number of lives,” Sangita Reddy, joint managing director, Apollo Hospitals, said. In fact, Apollo Hospitals in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata set up a pilot test last year to help its employees better understand their risk of developing heart disease. Preliminary findings from the pilot indicate that the test is able to identify a younger and wider set of patients at risk of developing heart diseases—ranging from low to medium to high. More than 80% of the people participating in the pilot were under the age of 45, and the captured data enabled researchers to identify high-risk patients in this age group, who do not typically get assessed for their risk for heart disease.
Troponin blood tests have been used in emergency rooms to help aid in the diagnosis of a heart attack but now research shows it could be used in a preventive setting. When added to existing cardiac risk scoring systems, such as the Framingham Risk Score, Abbott’s test can more accurately predict a person’s chances of having a cardiac event even for one who shows no apparent symptoms of cardiac disease—potentially years in advance.
Says Dr Jaganathan Sickan, senior associate medical director, Diagnostics, Abbott, “Since the High Sensitive Troponin-I blood test will be included in routine check-up packages for patients with health profiles that indicate heightened risk of heart attacks, more than 800,000 patients will be screened at participating Apollo centres and added to the registry every year.”
The goal is to understand how heart disease affects Indians, as well as to identify the factors that put them at risk of heart disease. “We are open to working with other players as well as government hospitals through a suitable model, should they wish to deploy cardiac risk stratification in their practices,” he said.
