Medical News Today; May 5, 2010
A diagnostic tool developed by Rice University scientists to detect heart attacks using a person’s saliva is being tested at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center (MEDVAMC) in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston.
John T. McDevitt, professor of chemistry and bioengineering at Rice, and his team of researchers at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative have developed a microchip sensor, the Nano-Bio-Chip, which processes saliva and yields on-the-spot results. McDevitt intends to establish Houston as the hub of a biomarker highway where Nano-Bio-Chips will be configured to diagnose a variety of diseases.
“The device works by analyzing saliva, looking for cardiac biomarkers of injury implicated in the heart attack,” said Dr. Biykem Bozkurt, professor of medicine at BCM.
“We find salivary tests, when combined with electrocardiograms (ECG), can provide more accurate information than the ECG alone for patients with chest pain,” McDevitt said. “Saliva-based tests have the potential to quickly diagnose heart-attack victims as well as to find false alarms.” (More)
This clearly isn’t quite ready for home medical self-testing (which has some dangers), but anything that can be done to give information to patients (and doctors) to speed up the diagnosis of a heart attack would be breakthrough. Let’s put more money into medical research and less money into airport security.
(Your chances of being killed by a terrorist = <1 in a million.
Your chances of dying from heart disease = 1 in 3.)
Also, didn’t Mork, in Mork and Mindy, beginning in 1978, introduce himself with “Nano -Nano”? This sure was pre-cognizant of the the emergence of nanotechnology.
And calling their company “Nano-Bio-Chips”? Why do I start getting hungry?
