2 Tests May Improve Heart Patients' Care, Studies Suggest
TUESDAY, Aug. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Doctors are always looking
for better ways to predict who will have a heart attack,
especially in people who have an intermediate risk of heart
disease. Now, studies have compared some available tests and
found just one that was significantly better than the others:
coronary artery calcium scans. A special type of CT scanning can
produce images that show if there are calcium deposits in the
coronary arteries. Someone with signs of coronary artery calcium
has 2.6 times greater odds of having a heart attack than someone
who doesn't have these deposits, according to one of the
studies. "Coronary artery calcium is far superior [at predicting
heart attack] to all of the other top-tier markers we studied,"
said Dr. Joseph Yeboah, the lead author of one of the studies
and an assistant professor of cardiology at Wake Forest Baptist
Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. Results from both studies
appear in the Aug. 22 issue o