Heart failure does not always mean the end of life, but it needs to be detected early, and a new screening technique has been discovered that indicates the possibility of a problem by performing only a simple saliva examination.
Heart failure is different from cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops working completely. In heart failure, the heart becomes too weak to pump blood throughout the body at a sufficient rate, depriving tissues of oxygen and making it difficult to get rid of metabolic waste.
Although there is no cure for the disease, a stable stage can be reached when appropriate treatment is provided.
Because early symptoms are often mild and may resemble symptoms of other conditions, people are usually diagnosed when heart failure has progressed to advanced and late stages. The delay in diagnosing the disease also increases due to other reasons related to current screening methods, which may not be readily available, expensive and difficult to perform.
A new biomarker for heart failure
Here comes the role of a small protein called S100A7. In patients with severe heart failure, levels of this protein rise much at a rate twice their level in healthy people.
This difference in protein levels can be accurately detected after taking a saliva sample and performing a newly developed mRNA test.
When analyzing samples from 30 patients with heart failure, the saliva test results matched standard medical tests used to measure protein levels by about 81%.
When compared with results from samples from six healthy volunteers, the saliva test identified patients with heart failure more accurately (82%) than standard tests (52%) based on differences in S100A7 protein levels.
Will saliva testing become available to everyone soon?
This technology needs to be tested and tried on a much wider group of people, before it can be generalized and become available to the general public.
Synthetic biology graduate student Roxanne Mutchler from Queensland University of Technology in Australia commented: “This work contributes to the development of personalized healthcare by helping people to detect signs and symptoms early before a disease develops, as well as making it easier to monitor its development.”
