Blood Test Helps Verify Heart Attacks in Chest Pain Sufferers, Study Finds

A new blood test is helping doctors sort out which patients who go to the hospital with chest pains are truly having heart attacks. The test measures a protein called troponin, which is produced only by dying heart cells. A study in a German hospital emergency department found that the test can help show which patients are free of heart attacks.

In the United States, about 5 million people arrive at emergency rooms with chest pain each year. Often, a heart problem is not apparent on an electrocardiogram, however. Patients with symptoms currently are admitted to the hospital for observation, until a heart attack can be confirmed or ruled out. The researchers report today in the New England Journal of Medicine that all the patients they studied who had a heart attack had high levels of one of the two forms of troponin they measured.