New Heart Scan Can Better Detect Blockages

A computed tomography scan of the heart can quickly detect fatty blockages or pockets of rock-hard calcium in the arteries, say U.S. researchers.

The new 64-slice CT scanners give us amazing pictures of the heart, said Dr. James A. Goldstein of William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich. With this very simple outpatient scan, you can rapidly determine whether the arteries are normal or abnormal — and if they’re abnormal, whether the disease is mild, moderate, or severe.

Each year some 6 million people in the United States are rushed to the emergency room with chest pain. At least half have inconclusive early test results; of these, approximately 65 percent are eventually found not to have suffered a heart attack — but not before racking up diagnostic costs totaling $10 billion to $12 billion annually.

Even low-risk patients with no history of heart disease can spend 18 to 24 hours in the emergency room as doctors repeat the ECG and blood tests, but using the new scan, patients with a normal CT or nuclear scan were allowed to go home immediately, and those with an abnormal scan were sent to the cardiac catheterization laboratory for further, invasive testing.

The findings are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.