Educational tool on heart failure

A new educational tool, produced by Bayer Diagnostics UK, a division of Bayer Healthcare, provides clinicians and laboratory staff with the latest thinking on heart failure

Bayer Diagnostics UK has published an eight-page Focus on Heart Failure educational tool for clinicians and laboratory staff.

The findings of the Shape (study of heart failure awareness and perception in Europe) survey, reported recently in the European Heart Journal, showed many misconceptions about heart failure - including that of the seriousness of the condition.

Over two thirds of those surveyed thought that heart failure patients would live longer than those with HIV and cancer, whereas 40% of heart failure patients die within a year of their first admission to hospital.

In Focus on Heart Failure, Bayer provides background to heart failure in the UK (where around 900,000 are living with the condition) and the use of measurement of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) as a rule-in/rule-out marker for the condition.

Within the piece, Paul Collinson, consultant chemical pathologist, St George's Hospital London, talks about the cost-effectiveness of BNP measurement and Theresa McDonagh, consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital London, describes how BNP testing is an ideal tool for selecting patients who should go on to be investigated via echocardiography and other expensive diagnostic techniques.

Also contained are articles from North Surrey PCT on development of its new heart failure protocol in conjunction with the Coronary Heart Disease Collaborative; the experiences of the department of chemical pathology at Ashford and St Peter's Hospital, where the Bayer BNP test on the Advia Centaur system has been used successfully, plus views from a GP and patient.

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