BG Medicine this week announced the publication of a multicenter clinical trial that found that the company's BGM Galectin-3 test was useful in predicting unplanned hospital readmissions and fatal events in heart failure patients.
The study, which was detailed in a paper published this month in the International Journal of Cardiology, followed 419 heart failure patients from four Spanish hospitals over a 12-month period and found that including galectin-3 testing in hospital discharge risk assessments identified elevated risk in roughly 25 percent of patients who would have otherwise been categorized as low risk.
The study also found that heart failure patients with elevated galectin-3 levels had an 84 percent higher chance of experiencing hospital readmission or a fatal event than patients with lower levels.
Hospital readmissions have become a key focus for BG Medicine's commercialization plans for the BGM Galectin-3 test. The company shifted toward this application last year in response to new guidelines implemented by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that penalize hospitals with high patient readmission rates. The IJC study follows two studies the company published in March that indicated that serial evaluation of galectin-3 levels could help clinicians identify heart failure patients at increased risk of unplanned hospital readmissions.