Heart Test Laboratories, Inc. announced that its European Patent Office Application EP3834729 has been granted. Diastolic dysfunction (impaired cardiac relaxation) is a sensitive and crucial indicator of overall heart health, providing one of the earliest signs of heart disease, with onset typically occurring before symptoms. Diastolic dysfunction is caused by all common issues that affect heart function or that produce hypertrophy. All patients with heart disease have diastolic dysfunction, in contrast to systolic dysfunction (reduced pumping of blood by the heart or reduced ejection fraction), which only affects a subset of patients and typically occurs at a more severe, often symptomatic, stage of heart disease.

Today, measures of diastolic function of the heart need to be assessed in a specialist cardiology environment, typically using echocardiography-based imaging. The ability to assess cardiac diastolic function using an ECG makes it a far more valuable cardiac screening tool, particularly in frontline or point-of-care clinical settings.