ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Cleerly has been successful with a new cardiac care model that helps clinicians tailor medical care with the aid of its disease-staging system, to reduce future events. Now the start-up has launched an ambitious landmark trial called TRANSFORM, to advance evidence for evaluating and treating heart disease based on disease characteristics rather than surrogates.
Half of people who suddenly die of a heart attack didn’t previously experience any symptoms. That anxiety-provoking statistic doesn’t necessarily mean that at any moment we have a 50-50 chance of dropping dead. It’s the fault of the current paradigm for assessing cardiac risk, which fails to identify, in a timely manner, some patients heading for trouble, and results in the overdiagnosis and treatment of others.
Conventional cardiac risk scores are based on patient attributes (age, gender, race), the presence of comorbidities (high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes), lifestyle factors (overweight, smoking), and the sequelae of disease (ischemia or stenosis), but all are surrogates for disease presence and progression, and not direct markers.
