HealthFirst-Chest pain

UNDATED (WJRT) (WJRT) -- (02/03/06)-- An injection may soon help doctors determine if chest pain is a sign of something serious. HealthFirst reporter Leslie LoBue says this could be a major breakthrough.

The sooner you can assess your risk, the better, since sudden heart attacks kill 250,000 Americans each year.

Millions of Americans have chest pain, but a heart problem isn't always the culprit.

Dr. Vasken Dilsizian is a nuclear cardiologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. "It's a very difficult diagnosis to make ,whether chest pain is coming from the heart or not."

Unless patients go to the hospital soon after, or during, their chest pain, it's hard for doctors to determine what's causing it.

A stress test will usually give them some answers. Retired Colonel John Jordan is having his third stress test.

"We'd like to have an agent that we can inject at rest without having to put you on a treadmill that could actually have imprints of what happens five hours or 8 hours or 30 hours ago," Dilsizian said.

Researchers now are studying a new injectable agent called zemiva that could do just that.

Q standard stress test measures blood flow. Doctors can see the break in flow during exercise. But when imaged three hours later, blood flow returns to normal, so doctors don't know there's a problem.

Zemiva measures metabolism, so doctors can clearly see the problem up to 30 hours later.

"The beauty is that while blood flow returns back to baseline, the switch in metabolism persists, and therefore, we can image it much longer than what we would do with blood flow," explained Dilsizian explained.

The cause of the pain could be found in less than one hour.

"If you had something that could be done in an hour or less, it'd be very, very convenient," Jordan said.

Jordan has to stick with the stress test for now, but doctors say zemiva could be approved as early as 2007.

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