An Apple Watch is credited with saving yet another user from an acute heart condition

The Apple Watch and its built-in heart-rate monitor has already reportedly detected a potentially fatal cardiovascular incident in 1 case; now, it seems the same wearable has done it again. A recent European Heart Journal report describes an incident in which an 80-year-old woman presented to a medical center in Mainz, Germany with chest pains.

However, her standard ECG and lab tests detected nothing out of the ordinary, and that may have been the end of the case - had the patient not had her Apple Watch and its own ECG records on her.

The patient (who had had a working life in engineering) highlighted these recordings and the fact that they exhibited a specific pattern of changes whenever she was having the pains she had come into the center with. These signs, as it turned out, were "marked ST-segment depressions" commonly associated with the condition of coronary artery ischemia.

Therefore, the patient was sent for a procedure to scan this vital artery in more detail on the strength of these readings. It resulted in a clear image of stenosis (or narrowing) in the left main stem of the vessel, with an additional obstruction in another part of it leading off from there.

These potentially dangerous anomalies were promptly treated with a coronary stent, and the patient was able to leave the center the next day. This case, then, may be yet another point in favor of wearables in real-world, clinical-grade diagnosis. Some analysts believe that this prospect is yet to become apparent; however, it sometimes seems that vision of the future is already here.