A NEW research institute will be set up within a year to ramp up research into heart diseases and improve their treatment here.

The Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI) will focus on studying four common heart conditions here: heart attacks, heart failure, congenital heart disease and diseases affecting arteries, including those of the heart.

These are the same areas that the second national specialist centre for heart diseases, the National University Heart Centre, Singapore (NUHCS), is focusing on,

The institute and the heart centre will work closely together on research, and use their findings to improve care for patients.

For example, the institute will probably search for proteins or genes whose presence indicates higher risk for a heart attack or heart failure.

Tests for these warning markers can then be done to identify higher risk patients in the heart centre, so that more aggressive treatment can be given to stave off the heart attack or heart failure.

Both the institute and the heart centre are run by the National University Health System, a public health group formed in January by merging the National University Hospital (NUH) and the National of Singapore's medical and dental schools.