WALTHAM, Mass., Sept. 20, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BG Medicine, Inc. (Nasdaq:BGMD), a company focused on the development and commercialization of novel biomarker-based diagnostics, announced today that results from a meta-analysis of three heart failure cohorts comprising 892 patients were presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA) in Boston, Mass. The study investigated the ability of galectin-3 blood levels in heart failure patients to predict the likelihood of near-term unplanned hospital re-admission for heart failure. The study demonstrated that heart failure patients who had elevated galectin-3 levels at the time of initial discharge from the hospital or emergency department for heart failure were hospitalized again for heart failure in the subsequent 90 days at a rate that was two to three times higher than for the patients in the study with lower galectin-3 levels. The data were featured in a presentation entitled, “Plasma Galectin-3 is Associated With Near-term Rehospitalization in Heart Failure: A Meta-Analysis,” presented by Rudolf de Boer, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Cardiology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Galectin-3 levels in the study were measured using the BGM Galectin-3 test, a novel blood test recently cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
