Articles
Your Health Alert
Week 3
Tuesday, November 4th,, 2008
Daily Camera, Boulder, CO
Treadmill Tests Miss Over 68% of Heart Disease!
The likelihood of having a normal stress test in the presence of significant coronary disease is as high as 80% in clinical studies. That is because it does not measure plaque, it measures blood flowing through the arteries.
Most people think that a heart attack happens after cholesterol plaque gradually builds up and plugs a coronary artery, and you have a heart attack. Well this is wrong 89% of the time! Most heart attacks are caused by plaque buildup that is not blocking the flow of blood. As little as 1% of plaque is actually in the lumen (the opening in the artery where blood flows).
What usually happens is that plaque begins to build inside the wall of an artery, causing the wall to bulge outward. A thin lining forms between the built up plaque in the wall and the opening of the artery. All the while, the blood is still flowing freely through the artery.
But, when this thin lining finally ruptures, platelets in the blood come to try and fix the rupture. This starts the formation of a blood clot which can form in about a minute or so. It is when this blood clot obstructs the artery that the vast majority of heart attacks and strokes occur.
Let’s repeat that, the vast majority of events are caused by plaque that ruptures and causes a clot formation, NOT by plaque plugging up an artery and obstructing blood flow. In fact, by the time plaque build up starts to restrict blood flow through the artery, coronary disease is fairly well advanced.
Why does all this matter so much? It matters because the test most commonly used to diagnose heart disease is the treadmill test, which only measures blood flow and not plaque. That is why stress tests miss over 68% of significant coronary disease. This is why people pass their stress tests and then have a fatal heart attack 4 weeks later. An artery has to be over 67% obstructed to show a problem on a stress test. If you have plaque that is only obstructing 15% of the artery, or 65% of the artery, the treadmill test will miss it! And if that plaque ruptures, you have a heart attack. Data shows that, 68% of all heart attacks occur in arteries that are less than 50% obstructed.
Come back next week and I will tell you how the EBT heart scans accurately predict almost all heart attacks.
Joe Turnbow, M.D.
Copyright 2008, Heart Attack Prevention Strategies P.C. All rights reserved.