The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has developed a cost-effective and rapid point-of-care test kit for diagnosing genetic bleeding disorders such as haemophilia A and Von Willebrand disease (VWD).
Diagnostics which are currently available require specialequipment and are expensive.
“Both Haemophilia A and VWD are under diagnoseddisorders in our country. There are only handful of comprehensive diagnosticcentres for bleeding disorders,” an official at ICMR said.
“Lack of awareness and diagnostic facilities, high costof tests are some of the factors for under-diagnosis of bleeding disorders inour country,” he said.
According to the ICMR, the kit is the world’s firstpoint-of-care test for specific diagnosis of any common bleeding disorder andcosts less than Rs 50 in comparison to existing conventional test that costaround Rs 4,000 to Rs 10,000.
The newly developed kit would help in diagnosis within 30minutes of blood sample collection. Also, this will be available at any levelof health care system including primary health care centres (PHCs) since itdoes not require any special expertise or infrastructure.
Worldwide, incidence of Haemophilia A is 1 per 10,000 malebirths and that of VWD is around 1 per cent of the general population.
“In India, there is no epidemiological data. We mayhave roughly 80,000-1,00,000 severe Haemophilia cases in our country, but thetotal number registered with Haemophilia Federation India (HFI) is only around19,000,” the official said.
Patients with severe Haemophilia A or VWD can have lifethreatening spontaneous or post-traumatic bleeding like brain haemorrhage andgastrointestinal bleeding. In emergency medical setting, it is important tohave a quick diagnosis of bleeding disorders for treatment.This rapid test kit can be used for thediagnosis of menorrhagia cases/ post-partum haemorrhage (PPH), gynecologicalcomplications among others.