Your Health Alert
Week 9
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
Daily Camera, Boulder, CO
Comparing Heart Scans
The newest buzz word seems to be Calcium Scores. They are certainly much more important than sleep numbers for mattresses. Calcium makes up a part of the plaque in our coronary arteries, which makes it an excellent marker for locating plaque. Plaque that ruptures, you remember, is the primary cause of heart attacks and strokes.
The question now becomes, how do you know if you have plaque in your coronary arteries? The answer is actually rather simple, you look for it. Your cholesterol numbers, good or bad, cannot tell you definitively if you have plaque. If you pass a stress test, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your arteries are plaque-free.
By far, the best screening test available today to detect and monitor coronary plaque is the EBT Heart Scan. EBT stands for Electron Beam Tomography. If you are a man in his forties or a woman in her fifties, an EBT heart Scan is the place to start to find your heart disease before it finds you. If you have any of the coronary risk factors mentioned in previous articles, then your decision to get an EBT heart scan should take on more of a sense of urgency.
I strongly recommend the EBT type heart scan, currently available only at Front Range Preventive Imaging here in Boulder, and at Colorado Heart in Denver. There are many other heart imaging sites around, but they use a helical scanner, sometimes referred to as a 64 slice scanner. Here are the differences between the two technologies, which I think are quite substantial:
| EBT Heart Scan | 64 slice helical scan | |
|---|---|---|
| Radiation- | less than living at altitude | at least 3 times at altitude |
| Speed- | 1/10 a second picture time | ¼ second picture time |
| Accuracy- | ess than 5% variability | 42+% variability |
The very low radiation exposure is an obvious benefit of EBT. The superior speed at which the EBT takes pictures allows for much greater precision and clarity. The difference in accuracy is extremely important. One of the biggest benefits in having an EBT heart scan is the ability to compare your first EBT heart scan with your next one. In this way, you will be able to monitor your progress and treatment program. This comparison is crucial for heart attack prevention.
Plaque Stability. Plaque stability is defined as a calcium score that does not rise by more than 14% in one year. Stable plaque very rarely ruptures to cause heart attacks and strokes. Because of the 42% variability in scan to scan comparison with the 64 slice scanners, determining if your calcium score has changed is essentially impossible. Effective scan to scan comparisons are only possible with an EBT heart scan. And it is possible for calcium scores to go down!
If you are at all concerned with your heart health, or if you would like to know where you really stand heart-wise, get an EBT heart scan. It might be the simple step that could save your life or that of a loved one.
Joe Turnbow, M.D.
Copyright 2008, Heart Attack Prevention Strategies P.C. All rights reserved.