Grant: Operating Grant: Priority Announcement (IPPH)

There are many things that may cause someone to feel chest pain; however, what everyone is worried most about and wants to know is if the pain is from a heart attack. This is an important question that both the patient and the doctor in the emergency room (ER) would like to have an answer to. Not only would they like a definitive answer, they want a quick answer so that the best available care can be given as fast as possible. To help the doctor decide if a heart attack is happening, blood tests are often used. Unfortunately, the current available blood tests are not very useful for early identification of heart injury in patients who arrive to the ER soon after they experience chest pain. In fact, experts suggest to measure these blood tests at least 6 hours (even up to 24 hours) after the patient comes to the ER before deciding that the patient is not having a heart attack. Obviously, this increases the wait time in the hospital before the patient can go home and also increases the overall wait time in the ER. Our study's goal is to use newer research blood tests to see if a heart attack can be identified within the first 90 minutes in the ER (as opposed to 6 hours). We plan to test a panel of blood tests as well as newer versions of the current blood test (troponin) in 600 patients who arrived within a couple of hours to the ER after their chest pain started. We believe that our study will show that early detection of heart attacks is possible and will also provide additional information on those patients who did not suffer a heart attack in the ER, but are at high risk for suffering a future heart attack (i.e., within 1 month as well as 1 year later). This study will provide important information on these research laboratory tests, bringing them one step closer to being used by hospital laboratories. Newer & better blood tests are the best options for detecting heart attacks faster and reducing the wait times in the ER to arrive at this diagnosis.