Blood tests put at risk by further NHS strikes

NHS blood test results are under threat after Unite said staff would be balloted over strike action. The union, which represents 100,000 healthcare workers, said it would serve formal proceedings and hold a vote that could bring thousands more NHS workers into the strike action this winter. If the strike goes ahead, the NHS will run a “bank holiday service” with some patients facing cancelled dialysis and chemotherapy treatments, senior health leaders warned.

GENETIC tests can identify thousands of middle-aged people at risk of heart attacks and strokes who would otherwise be “invisible” to the NHS, a pilot study has found.

GPS offer statins to around 8 million people in England, based on checks including blood pressure and cholesterol levels. But NHS research involving people aged 45 to 64 found around one quarter of people were given a different risk profile, if genetic tests were included. If tests were routinely offered to everyone in this age group, around 700,000 extra people would be offered statins. As a result, up to 11,000 heart attacks and strokes could be prevented within a decade, scientists said.

The NHS study, called Heart, offered genetic tests to nearly 1,000 people aged 45 to 64, in the hope of better predicting their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over the next 10 years.

Doctors at 12 GP surgeries in the North-east and north Cumbria found that the calculated risk of heart disease based on routine measures such as family history, blood pressure, body mass index and smoking status changed for about a quarter of participants when their DNA was taken into account.

In 13 per cent of cases, GPS said the increase in risk was significant enough to change their treatment of the patient – for example by offering statins.

The results, from the world’s first pilot investigating the use of genomic “polygenic risk score (PRS) testing” to support the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in NHS clinical practice, were unveiled at the American Heart Association annual world congress.

Researchers said the findings meant patients who would otherwise have been “invisible” to the NHS could be offered better advice and medication to lower their risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Prof Sir Peter Donnelly, the founder and chief executive of Genomics, the company that developed the genetic tests, said: “We hope that this is an important first step towards a more widespread uptake and adoption of genomic approaches like this.

“Heart studied the impact in cardiovascular disease, but in future a single blood sample could be used to calculate an individual’s risk of many different common diseases simultaneously.”

Offering the test to everyone in England aged between 45 to 64 could identify 700,000 people who should be offered statins – and could cut the number of heart attacks and strokes by 11,000 over 10 years.