PEORIA, Ill. – UnityPoint Health is using Heart Health Month to talk about a new piece of technology they have in Peoria that can detect potential cardiac events more quickly.
Troponin — a protein found in your heart — is already used to test for heart pain, but now there’s a new high sensitivity version of that testing.
“It’s a type of blood test that, if performed in the Emergency Department and somebody’s been having heart pain for as short a time as 30 to 60 minutes, it can go positive. That’s the high sentivity part of it,” said Dr. Donald Yakel, UnityPoint Peoria Cardiologist.
Yakel says high-sensitivity Troponin testing can lead to potentially better and quicker treatment of a heart event.
“There was a different test — it was still a Troponin test — but it was slower. It would take two to three hours to go positive,” said Yakel. “So, it wasn’t quite as sensitive. It didn’t allow us to diagnost cardiac conditions such as a heart attack as quickly as we can now.”
Yakel says the high-sensitivity test is also easier to administer. He says, however, higher sensitivity testing means there is a slightly increased possibility a test could generate a false positive; but it could also be used to help warn of conditions that could lead to a heart attack.
High-sensitivity Troponin testing is only avaialble in the Emergency Department of the Methodist, Pekin, and Proctor hospitals at UnityPoint. But, Yakel suggests talking to your primary care doctor first, if you think something is wrong.
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