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Plaque is the Best Measure of Heart Disease
Perhaps you have early heart disease and danger is far
in the future, say in 20 years. Or, you could have
extensive coronary plaque with high probability of heart attack next
week. Which one are you? Obviously, it's a crucial
distinction, one that cholesterol values will not make.
Average LDL cholesterol in the U.S.: 131 mg/dl. Average
LDL cholesterol for people with heart attacks: 134
mg/dl. Will your LDL cause a heart attack? Heads or
tails? The pitfalls of cholesterol are common to all
statistical predictors of risk. It is little better than
a coin toss for the vast majority of us.
A far superior measure of your risk for heart attack is to actually measure the amount of coronary plaque you have that results in heart attack. We therefore need a tool to measure the amount of atherosclerotic plaque lining your coronary arteries. And we need to do so along the entire length of all three coronary arteries, top to bottom. With a heart catheterization, you might be told, “You have a 30% blockage in the right coronary artery and a 50% blockage in the left anterior descending artery. But these blockages are just the tip of the iceberg. The process is really far more extensive. We require a more accurate means of quantifying all coronary plaque, both visible and hidden. The more extensive the plaque, the higher the risk for heart attack, even in the absence of “severe” blockage. How do you measure plaque? 
Imaging technologies are advancing at breakneck
speed. The days of invasive procedures to diagnose heart
disease are going the way of exploratory abdominal
surgery and 8-track tapes.
The newest CT scanning technologies offer the best balance of precision, ease, cost, and availability. The perennial problem for imaging the heart has been its rapid motion. The most recent CT scanners have the advantage of being “ultra-fast” and provide crystal-clear still-frame images, even of millimeter sized coronary plaque. Two CT devices are the pre-eminent leaders in the race to provide mainstream coronary plaque detection: electron-beam tomography (EBT) and multi-detector CT (MDCT). The process is simple. Time from lying down on the scan table to looking at your heart pictures: About two minutes. The quantity of plaque in your coronary arteries will be reported to you as a “score”. Just as in golf, the lower your score, the better. The best score? Zero – no detectable plaque. The higher your score, the greater your potential for heart attack. See Reason #3: New Medical Discoveries About Heart Attacks |
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TERMS & CONDITIONS |
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Copyright 2005, 2006 Track Your Plaque, LLC Track Your Plaque, the logo, and stylized text are service marks of Track Your Plaque, LLC |
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"plaque imaging is ...not to be confused with risk factors, which merely estimate a probability of developing atherosclerosis.
Rather, [plaque imaging] directly measures atherosclerosis, irrespective of the presence or absence of risk factors;
it provides the final common denominator and is the most powerful predictor of cardiac events."