Dr Tom Hyde, Cotswold Cardiology

British Heart Foundation Features Breakthrough Heart Attack Prevention Technology in Online News Programme for World Heart Day

CaRi-Heart® Users share Excitement on Potential for Heart Attack Prediction and Prevention

Oxford, United Kingdom, September 29, 2023— On World Heart Day, Caristo Diagnostics Limited, a global leader in cardiac and vascular disease diagnostics and risk prediction, confirms that its CaRi-Heart® technology has been featured as part of a British Heart Foundation (BHF) programme anchored by presenter and journalist Louise Minchin on ITN Business  (link to CaRi-Heart segment or watch the entire programme). The CaRi-Heart technology, which was developed with funding from the BHF, harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze images of the heart arteries and predict the likelihood of a heart attack – based on information that is not otherwise available using current diagnostic techniques.

According to BHF, there are around 7.6 million people in the UK living with heart or circulatory disease, and many more who are, but don’t even know it yet, because their condition is hidden or silent. On this year’s World Heart Day, the British Heart Foundation launches The Hidden Heart programme to explore hidden heart conditions, innovations in research and new treatments. The programme features Caristo’s CaRi-Heart technology, with insights from the technology’s scientific inventor as well as a clinical user and a patient. The CaRi-Heart technology can uniquely detect coronary inflammation, which research has shown to be a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease progression and mortality, but is not visible in any other routine heart scan. Clinicians can then use this new information together with quantification of plaques, all provided by the CaRi-Heart platform, to identify at-risk patients more effectively and optimize their treatment, so future cardiac events can be prevented.

“Around 200,000 patients every year undergo a cardiac CT scan to look for disease in the heart arteries. Of these only 20% are seen as having significant artery narrowings that are acted upon, the other 80% are archived,” said Professor Charalambos Antoniades, British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford. “That means potentially tens of thousands of people in need of treatment are overlooked because plaque alone is not as predictive of future heart attack risk as the combination of plaque and inflammation.”

Dr Tom Hyde, consultant cardiologist at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon and lead clinician at Cotswold Cardiology, has been an early adopter using CaRi-Heart results to assess his patients’ heart conditions. “Inflammation plays an important part in the development of coronary artery disease and is a strong predictor of disease progression and cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or death,” commented Dr. Hyde. “Traditionally, there has been no way for us to see or measure coronary inflammation. With Cari-Heart technology we can now identify people with hidden risk and take preventative measures early on. In addition, seeing the visual improvement in coronary inflammation levels gives my patients the reassurance and peace of mind, that cannot really be put into words. Seeing is believing.”

The Hidden Heart programme interviewed one of Dr. Hyde’s patients, who received CaRi-Heart results twice during the last few years.

British Heart Foundation was one of the earliest supporters of Professor Antoniades’ research to predict heart attacks years before they happen. The research led to the creation of Caristo Diagnostics and its development of the CaRi-Heart platform for heart attack prediction and prevention. “BHF is one of the very few funders in the UK to support early-stage cardiovascular research. The scientific breakthrough behind the CaRi-Heart technology would not have been possible without early support from them, and that is why BHF funding is so crucial for this kind of research,” said Professor Antoniades.

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