Heart failure, often misunderstood as simply a weaker heart, is actually a serious condition where the heart struggles to pump blood effectively throughout the body. This can lead to tissue damage due to lack of oxygen and waste buildup, ultimately threatening life. While treatment can manage symptoms and even allow for remission, early diagnosis is crucial for better outcomes.
Unfortunately, catching heart failure in its early stages often proves difficult. Symptoms tend to be subtle and easily mistaken for other common ailments, leading to delayed diagnoses when the condition has already progressed. Existing screening methods are invasive, expensive, and inaccessible for many, further hindering early detection efforts.
Now, researchers believe a simple saliva test could change this landscape. Their focus is on a protein called S100A7, which levels significantly increase in individuals experiencing acute heart failure – almost double compared to healthy people.
The breakthrough lies in a new messenger RNA (mRNA) test capable of detecting these elevated S100A7 levels in saliva samples. In initial trials involving 30 heart failure patients and six healthy volunteers, this saliva test proved remarkably accurate. It successfully matched standard medical protein level tests around 81% of the time and even outperformed those traditional tests when comparing S100A7 levels between heart failure patients and healthy individuals (82% accuracy versus 52%).
While these early results are promising, further research with a much larger population is essential before this saliva test becomes widely available. If successful, it could revolutionize heart failure screening by offering a simple, affordable, and non-invasive way to detect the condition earlier, potentially saving countless lives and improving patient outcomes.
“This work contributes to the development of personalized healthcare by aiding people to detect signs and symptoms before the onset of a condition and to easily monitor its progression,” says synthetic biology graduate student Roxane Mutschler from Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
