Evaluation of the Meritas® BNP Test for Point-of-Care Testing

Background BNP and NT-proBNP are widely used as rule-out tests for heart failure (HF) and they are frequently requested by primary care doctors. A point-of-care (POC) test would reduce the time to diagnosis for patients with suspected HF. The aim of the study was to evaluate a POC BNP test. Methods Plasma BNP results obtained with the Meritas® POC instrument (n = 82) were compared with the corresponding plasma BNP results analyzed on an Advia Centaur analyzer (Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany). Results The two methods showed concordant results with a Passing-Bablok correlation between the two methods: BNP(Meritas) = 1.00 x BNP(Siemens) + 1.09; r = 0.9773. Conclusions The study show that the Meritas® BNP assay could be used in primary care permitting rapid BNP testing to rule out heart failure.