{"id":15,"date":"2011-05-25T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2011\/05\/heart-disease-test-goes-green.html"},"modified":"2011-05-25T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T14:00:00","slug":"heart_disease_test_goes_green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2011\/05\/heart_disease_test_goes_green.html","title":{"rendered":"Heart disease test goes green"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"ICG.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/files\/ICG.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"206\" align=\"right\"\/>Heart disease is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/heartdisease\/facts.htm\">leading cause<\/a> of death in the United States, and costs the country upwards of $316 billion in terms of healthcare costs, drugs and lost productivity. Yet the methods currently used to identify those at highest risk of heart attack leave much to be desired. A team of researchers hopes to change that by introducing a new type of catheterization procedure that produces detailed images of the fatty buildup inside blood vessel walls in the heart.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis may be a new way to identify high risk plaques in coronary arteries\u2014 the ones responsible for heart attacks,\u201d says <a href=\"https:\/\/cmir.mgh.harvard.edu\/fac\/faculty\/about\/13\">Farouc Jaffer<\/a> of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, lead author of <a href=\"https:\/\/stm.sciencemag.org\/content\/3\/84\/84ra45\">a paper<\/a> describing the technology that appears in <em>Science Translational Medicine<\/em> today.<\/p>\n<p>The approach uses an imaging agent known as near-infrared lipid-binding dye indocyanine green (<span class=\"caps\">ICG<\/span>)\u2014which is already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (<span class=\"caps\">FDA<\/span>)\u2014to detect the fatty buildups likely to burst in the heart.<\/p>\n<p>In this proof of principle study, the team fed one group of rabbits cholesterol-heavy foods for eight weeks, while keeping their control counterparts on a healthy diet. They then injected the dye, and 20 minutes later inserted a catheter, which as expected picked up more infrared signals in the rabbits on the cholesterol-rich diet.<\/p>\n<p>In future, the Massachusetts General Hospital team plans to test this procedure in heart disease patients to determine its ability to identify those at highest risk of heart attack.<\/p>\n<p><em>Image: Aorta after injection of <span class=\"caps\">ICG<\/span> in an atherosclerotic rabbit.  Courtesy of Science Translational Medicine\/<span class=\"caps\">AAAS<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and costs the country upwards of $316 billion in terms of healthcare costs, drugs and lost productivity. Yet the methods currently used to identify those at highest risk of heart attack leave much to be desired. A team of researchers hopes to change that by introducing a new type of catheterization procedure that produces detailed images of the fatty buildup inside blood vessel walls in the heart.&nbsp; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2011\/05\/heart_disease_test_goes_green.html#wpn-more-15\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/2011\/05\/heart_disease_test_goes_green.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odds-and-ends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/spoonful\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}