Aspirin is a powerful and important medication in management of various cardiovascular diseases. Simply put, aspirin shuts down the platelets, a clot-producing cells, and mainly through this action aspirin helps prevent heart attacks and strokes.
Newsday reports that up to 27 percent of people taking aspirin may be resistant to it. The test developed by a San Diego-based company Accumetrics, can accurately predict the necessary dose of aspirin for a particular patient.
The company describes its system:
The VerifyNow™ Aspirin Assay is a qualitative test to aid in the detection of platelet dysfunction due to aspirin (ASA) ingestion in citrated whole blood for the point of care or laboratory setting.
The VerifyNow™ System is a turbidimetric based optical detection system which measures platelet induced aggregation as an increase in light transmittance. The system consists of an instrument, a disposable assay device and controls. The assay device contains reagents based on microbead agglutination technology. The assay device contains a lyophilized preparation of human fibrinogen-coated beads, platelet agonist, preservative and buffer. The patient sample is 3.2% citrated whole blood, which is automatically dispensed from the blood collection tube into the assay device by the instrument, with no blood handling required by the user.
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