the american heart association has
estimated like twenty thirty
over forty percent of the u_s_
population will have some form of
cardiovascular disease
we spoke with doctor douglas harrington
c_e_o_ of a very cooperate
who is author of numerous peer-reviewed
publications we asked doctor harrington
about heart disease
ball heart health test
one of the most important things is
illustrated by the fact that
fifty percent of people who have a heart
attack at normal cholesterol levels yet
cholesterols one of the main things we
look at next blood pressure
and the other part of it is that sixty
percent of people who have a heart
attack
have essentially been given a clean bill
of health by their position
and uh...
are used to dress or just kind of the
poster child for this he had a normal
stress test
two weeks before he dropped out of a
heart attack
and i think what people miss is the fact
that everybody folks is a narrowing of
the arteries because you can put stance
in it it's very procedure reentered
uh... yet seventy five percent bart
attacks are caused by
something else that's a related
phenomenon called plaque rupture
and uh... it what it is it's like a
pimple on the side of the artery
and it's very fragile alikum poppin when
it doesn't cause a blood clot almost
immediately
and that is the most common cause of
heartburn tax
why didn't they are developed this heart
health test
the goal was to find out
what
was involved in the biologic
process
that cause these things to form in your
wall
the artery awal
and to do that we started with animal
models where we looked at
how platforms
and what biological pathways were
activated
and we identified about to turn fifty
different pathways that
proteins so in other words when i say a
pathway i mean
something happened in the wall of the
vessel the cost
of protein to appear that's not normally
there
and uh... over that ten-year period we
near at the number of candidates that
could be useful
to help identify people interest and to
about forty two
and then we engaged in the four major
clinical trials
that went through the faces of showing
that we could actually use these
proteins to identify people
who have disease
from those who didn't
and we've been discovered that we could
actually use uh... subset of these
proteins to predict
who is at risk of having a heart attack
from
vocal plaque
within the next five years
and it's a seven protein signature
how is this heart health tests taken
we take uh... blood sample from u and
measure
proteins in serum
but then we also use there are seven
proteins their unique they're not once
they're commonly used in medical
practice today
uh... and then we couple those with four
critical clinical features your age
your sax
whether your diabetic and whether you
have a positive family history
and we assemble those into something
called an algorithm which is analyzed in
a computer
and it gives you katie single result
that can be used to calculate your heart
risk age
your risk relative to other people your
age
and it can also guide
what you need to do to uh... lower your
risk
the tests can be requested from any
physician anywhere in the country
uh... they would simply have to call
our facility in her mind can get a kid
sent out to them
uh... in california we do have draw
centers situated throughout the state
and a number of positions that are are
you are going to test
and then this has to be performed at our
facility but the results would be sent
back to where the patient originated
our whole focus on developing tests
is to identify tools for physicians and
health care professionals
catch people before they develop
full-blown disease and in
this particular case were focusing on
pretty vascular disease and
so far it's been very exciting because
of the adoption and the uh...
the response to the their approaches is
being received very positively
throughout uh...
the medical community and i'm not
speaking strictly it
just physicians i'm also talking about
natura paths
uh... doctors of osteopathy nurse
practitioners internists family
practitioners and cardiologists
much rather
prevent this disease from ever
developing and not having people become
debilitated
haven't read the end stage disease and
that's really our mission here in here
