Abbott diagnostic tool used in chest pain study

A diagnostic point-of-care (POC) tool made by Abbott has been used in a chest pain study, it has emerged.

The Abbott i-STAT System was used as the patient-side POC testing method for the research, which has been published this month in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

The study looked into whether diagnostic testing at the site or near the site of the patient with chest pain enables physicians to make a quicker diagnosis.

It was concluded that the patient-side POC testing allowed doctors to decide up to 20 minutes quicker than those who used a standard lab to evaluate results.

Some 2,000 patients were involved in the study, which was led by Dr Richard Ryan, vice-chairman of the department of emergency medicine at the University of Cinncinati College of Medicine.

He described the findings as “very significant”, because the initiation of treatment in people with chest pain can make the difference between life and death.

“Ask yourself this question, ‘would I rather wait more than an hour to find out if I was having a heart attack or would I want to know in 15 minutes?’ The answer 100 per cent of the time would be ‘the sooner the better’,” Dr Ryan said.

Abbott says some of the advantages of the i-Stat product are its ease of use, lab-accurate results and the need for only a small sample size.