Articles
Your Health Alert
Week 4
Tuesday, November 11th,, 2008
Daily Camera, Boulder, CO
Heart Scans Find Plaque in Your Arteries
Having plaque in your coronary arteries puts you at risk of having a heart attack. There is a simple, non-invasive way to tell for sure whether or not you have plaque; an EBT heart scan gives you the information you need to prevent a heart attack or sudden death.
To look for breast cancer, women get yearly mammograms. That has been a good thing since these yearly check ups have dramatically reduced the incidence of death from breast cancer. We do screening tests looking for colon cancer and prostate cancer. I feel that we should do the same kind of screening for heart disease, the disease that kills more Americans than all cancers combined!
Over 50% of heart attack victims do not qualify for cholesterol lowering therapy based on traditional “risk factors”. Cholesterol numbers do not tell you if you have plaque. The fact that you can run a marathon, doesn’t tell you. A stress test is normal in over 80% subjects with heart disease and at risk for a heart attack. A heart scan tells you if you have plaque, and, it can tell you early enough to do something about it.
There are two basic technologies that can do heart scans. One is called a 64 Slice CAT scan or “helical CAT scanner”, the other is EBT Heart Scan or Electron Beam Tomography.
The one I recommend is the EBT scanner for several reasons. The first reason is that the EBT scanner is much more accurate. It also has only 1/3 the radiation of helical scanners. The biggest reason is that helical CAT scanners can have a margin of error of up to 42%. I use heart scans to recheck a patient and see if they are improving or getting worse after a year or so. Only the EBT scanner has been shown to be precise enough to do follow-up scans.
The EBT scan gives you a “calcium score”, a measure of plaque. This score can range from 0 to thousands. It finds heart disease even in patients who may have no “risk factors”. To find out if you are doing enough to prevent a heart attack, get a second scan, usually a year later, and compare the two. If your calcium score has not increased by more than 14%, your treatment is working. It might even go down. If your score has increased more than the 14%, you need to consider a more aggressive treatment plan.
Joe Turnbow, M.D.
Copyright 2008, Heart Attack Prevention Strategies P.C. All rights reserved.