MRI can improve heart failure detection in women
A research team led by the University of East Anglia (UEA), the University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds has been able to fine-tune how magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to detect heart failure in women’s hearts, meaning more female patients can be diagnosed at an earlier stage. Their work has been published in the journal Heart.
When a heart starts to fail, it is unable to pump blood out effectively, and so the pressure in the heart rises. In cases with diagnostic uncertainty, an invasive procedure called right heart catheterisation is required to directly measure the heart pressures — but while this is very accurate, said UEA’s Dr Gareth Matthews, it is also an invasive procedure, and therefore carries risks for patients.
“For this reason, doctors tend to use echocardiograms, which are based on ultrasound, to assess heart function, but this is inaccurate in up to 50% of cases,” added Matthews, a co-author on the new study.
Researchers at UEA and the University of Sheffield created an equation which allowed them to non-invasively derive the pressure in the heart using an MRI scanner. However, this method wasn’t as accurate as the researchers would have liked in diagnosing heart failure in women, especially in early or borderline disease.
This is because women’s hearts are biologically different to men’s, and suffer disproportionately from a type of heart failure where the pumping function of the heart is preserved but the ability of the heart to relax and fill with blood is impaired. Echocardiography really struggles to diagnose this type of heart failure, so the improvements from this new study should enable more women to be diagnosed accurately and hopefully drive better treatments.
“By refining the [MRI] method for women specifically, we were able to diagnose 16.5% more females with heart failure,” said UEA’s Dr Pankaj Garg, lead author on the study.
“This improved method will increase early detection, meaning more women can get life-saving treatment sooner.”
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