NO HEART CT
USE OF ADDITIONAL IMAGING IN PEOPLE AT LOW RISK FOR HEART DISEASE ISN’T HELPFUL, ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS
If you’re at low risk for heart disease should you have a CT study to look at your heart’s blood vessels? No, a study led by Roger Blumenthal, director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins, concludes.
BLUMENTHAL: What we found is that there were a small number of individuals who had some build up of plaque in their arteries and their doctors encouraged those patients to take more aspirin and cholesterol lowering medicine, but there was no real difference over the next year and a half in terms of heart attacks or strokes. So what this study tells us is that it’s important sometimes to understand why a doctor is doing a test and at least in a low risk population there probably is not a need to do a more advanced CT angiogram. :33
Blumenthal says this study proves once again that just because the technology exists doesn’t mean we should use it on everyone, as there are risks and costs with cardiac CT. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
