New CT process 'may give heart disease clue'

Many people believe that cancer is the world's biggest killer, as the media is frequently hailing the next miracle cure and high-profile celebrity cases are often highlighted in detail, but heart disease actually kills more people than any other condition on the planet.

The condition is responsible for millions of worldwide deaths each year and specialists are constantly seeking new treatments and ways of reducing the risk to those with affordable health insurance.

Now, it seems that experts in the US may be a step closer to identifying the precursors of heart disease earlier and helping to prescribe treatments sooner.

As well as leading to a reduction in the number of deaths from heart disease, the new findings may also put an end to the suffering which heart disease causes in so many people and their loved ones, say a team of researchers led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Radiologists have developed a new type of CT scan which identifies both narrowing of coronary arteries and areas of myocardial ischemia, or restricted blood flow to heart muscle tissue, which gives a better indication of whether a person has coronary artery disease.

Dr Ricardo Cury, a cardiac imaging specialist at the MGH Heart Center and the study's principal investigator, commented: "This is among the first demonstrations of the use of cardiac CT to detect both coronary artery stenosis and resulting myocardial ischemia simultaneously in a single examination."

He told those with medical insurance coverage that the appearance of plaques on CT images sometimes may not indicate whether or not they actually compromise the heart muscle's blood supply, which is integral to heart disease identification.

With the new type of nuclear perfusion scan, this problem is solved, however, leading to the possibility of better outcomes, he stated.

"While nuclear perfusion imaging provides information that can help guide patient treatment, it has limitations that can lead to either false negative or false positive findings.

"The ability to acquire anatomical visualisation of coronary artery stenosis together with physiological assessment of myocardial perfusion in a single study could improve diagnostic accuracy while potentially reducing costs and radiation exposure," Dr Cury explained.

He told medical health insurance customers that as this particular study was conducted on a small scale, teams will now conduct larger-scale tests aimed at finding out whether the new CT scans can be used to prevent the millions of deaths which heart diseases causes every year.

By James McCann

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