Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute is now the only institution in Tennessee with access to the Corus CAD, a new blood test that can predict if a patient is at high risk for heart disease.
Only offered at a few institutions throughout the U.S., CAD will specifically help doctors determine the likelihood of a patient suffering from obstructive coronary artery disease.
Patients will only be required to have their blood drawn. The blood will then be analyzed by measuring the expression of 23 different genes. Afterward, the probability of having an obstruction in a major coronary artery will be calculated based on the patient's age, gender and genetic makeup.
The test was developed as a part of a new medical field called genomic medicine, which enables doctors to further personalize patient care based on the unique genomic makeup of individual patients — an important factor for many visiting the doctor. For this reason, the blood test interests many physicians.
“With this test, we have another tool to non-invasively diagnose our patients with CAD,” said John McPherson, M.D., director of the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “The Corus test is appealing as it takes into account individual genomic characteristics and factors in age and gender in the analysis.”
The test will not be used in emergency situations, however. Only patients who have stable chest pain, do not have a previous history of diabetes or heart disease and are not taking steroids or immunosuppressive drugs, will be tested using the blood draw.
“Patients with unstable symptoms should be evaluated differently — more urgently — as this test has a three-day turnaround,” McPherson said. “The test is not designed for patients with known severe CAD or with diabetes, as different genes may be important in this population.”
VUMC is able to offer this new form of diagnosis due to its participation in the clinical trials. Along with researchers from 40 other institutions, McPherson collected samples from patients suffering from stable chest pain. The validation study included almost 3,000 patients, he said.
Other major institutions offering this test across the U.S. at this time include the Minneapolis Heart Institute and Duke University.
