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Quick Scan for Heart Disease
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By Phyllis McIntosh
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Diabetes Focus First Quarter, 2007
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A new type of CT scan could soon enable emergency room doctors to determine within seconds which patients with chest pain have heart disease and should be admitted to the hospital and which can be safely discharged. In this test, known as multidetector computed tomography (MDCT), the scanner rotates much faster than the typical CT (aka CAT) scanner. As a result, it captures sharper images of a moving object like the beating heart, explains Udo Hoffmann, M.D., assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. And, he adds, the scan takes only about 15 seconds.
Hoffmann and colleagues administered the scan to 103 patients who had come to the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room complaining of chest pain, and findings were compared with results of other diagnostic tests performed during the patients’ hospitalization. Of 14 patients diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome during hospitalization, all showed evidence of significant plaque buildup in the arteries on the MDCT scan. Of the 41 people whose scans showed no significant plaque, none were diagnosed with heart disease during hospitalization or by a five-month follow-up. The scans found no significant narrowing of the arteries in 73 patients, and subsequent tests confirmed that none of them had heart disease.
So far, only a tiny minority of emergency rooms are equipped with the new scanners, Dr. Hoffmann says, although they’re becoming more widely used. He adds that they have the potential to save many patients the cost and anxiety of hospitalization and additional tests. While chest pain is the most common symptom of heart attack, more than 6 million people a year are admitted to the hospital because the diagnosis isn’t clear.
“For patients, it’s a big deal to spend a day or two in the hospital not knowing if the pain they experienced is related to their heart,” says Dr. Hoffmann. “It would be a big relief for them if we could tell them quickly.”
Source: Circulation
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