Painless Pen Test

By Catherine Winters

At Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, researchers are scrutinizing a small, penlike device, called an arterial tonometer, that may someday be used to painlessly screen people for heart disease. “Nearly half of heart attacks come without warning, which means we need to do a better job of screening people,” says Iftikhar Kullo, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Mayo. “This test has that potential.”

The pressure-sensing device is placed on the carotid (neck) artery and then the femoral (thigh) artery to measure a person’s aortic pulse wave, which is the pressure generated when the heart pumps blood into vessels.
           
Researchers recently found that the stiffer a person’s arteries are—a sign of calcium buildup—the faster each person’s pulse wave is; the more elastic and healthy arteries are, the slower the wave. As exciting as this finding is, more research is needed before the method can be used routinely, says Kullo, lead study author of the research published in Hypertension, a journal of the American Heart Association.