10-20% of all emergency room visits are by patients with symptoms suggestive of a heart attack. Typically, there are screening tests that doctors can use to try and rule in or out heart attack as a cause of the symptoms. One such test measures the amount of troponin in a patient’s blood.

Troponin is a heart muscle protein that is released into the bloodstream during a heart attack. In the past, such tests took up to 6 hours to detect whether there was troponin in the blood or not.

However, a recent study tested a new high-sensitivity test for measuring troponin, and the findings suggest that this test will only take an hour before results will show if the patient is actually having a heart attack.

This is very encouraging news because time is crucial if the patient is in fact having a heart attack. Every 30 minutes of delay increases the mortality risk by 7.5%.

Hopefully the findings of this study are accurate, and emergency departments across the world will begin instituting this new, quicker test. Then it will be another example of how the standard for caring for patients continues to improve, making all of us safer.

You can read an article outlining this study here:

[Troponin T test provides possible one hour diagnosis of heart attack](http://www.news-medical.net/news/20160115/Troponin-T-test-provides-possible-one-hour-diagnosis-of-heart-attack.aspx)