A shot of adrenaline is standard treatment when a patient is in critical shock (see fact box) due to trauma, sepsis or cardiac arrest. But for hundreds of patients a year, this turns out to be the wrong treatment because they already have critically high levels of adrenaline in their blood, sending their heart into overdrive and increasing their risk of death.
A new rapid test from a group of researchers at DTU will be able to show doctors whether the patient needs adrenaline or another form of treatment to survive, typically beta blockers, which block the action of adrenaline, thus lowering the heart rate and reducing the amount of blood the heart pumps out every minute.
The new test is being developed in collaboration with professor in transfusion medicine Pär Johansson from Rigshospitalet. He has found that if you measure the content of so-called succinic acid in the blood (see fact box) and use it as a biomarker, it can show doctors which patients have a more severe reaction to shock and release particularly high levels of adrenaline into the blood. Professor Winnie E. Svendsen from DTU Bioengineering has utilized this knowledge in her work to develop the new rapid test.
