Heart Disease Statistics: Every 60 seconds, someone in this country suffers a fatal heart attack. Two out of every three first time heart attack victims had no prior warning symptoms. For one out of every three first time heart attack victims, that heart attack was their last. Don't let appearances fool you. A recent medical study found that 88% of new heart attack victims would have been classified as low to intermediate risk according to their pre-event risk factors. Every day, seemingly healthy individuals with low cholesterol, who maintained a healthy diet and exercise program and who passed annual physical exams and treadmill testing suffer fatal or debilitating heart attacks. Heart disease is by far the number one killer of both men and women in the U.S., causing 43% of all deaths.
Just how good is this test? When the EBT coronary calcium score is zero, when no calcium is detected, the probability of developing symptomatic heart disease during the next 10 years is 1% or less. The odds ratio; the ratio of events in an interest group to events in a base population, of developing symptomatic heart disease is 3 to 1 for people with scores of 1 - 80 (the base population is people with zero scores), 8 to 1 for people with scores of 81-400 and 25 to 1 for people with scores above 400. Compare those numbers to the odds ratio's for the traditional heart disease risk factors: 1.8 to 1 for total cholesterol above 240mg/dl; 1.8 to 1 for HDL cholesterol below 35mg/dl; 5.4 to 1 for diabetes, 3.6 to 1 for smoking; and 2.6 to 1 for high blood pressure. Your calcium sore is more predictive of future events than all traditional risk factors combined!
And anyone who has ever passed a treadmill test as part of their annual physical thinking that they were free of heart disease should know this. A treadmill test can only detect heart disease after a blockage has reached 85% or greater. That's right! This test only tells us who needs surgery or angioplasty. If you are comfortable waiting until then that's OK but most of us would prefer to know before the disease gets this severe. What's even scarier is that half of all heart attacks occur in individuals whose blockages are 30% or less, when the plaque suddenly ruptures and completely occludes the coronary artery. All of these individuals would have passed a treadmill right up until the moment their heart attack occurred.
The best news today is that heart disease is treatable and reversible. Your physician now has medications which both lower your cholesterol and stop and reverse plaque formation. Electron Beam CT (EBT) heart scanning was developed to detect early heart disease so that heart attacks and heart surgery could be avoided. All men over age 35 and women over age 45 should undergo EBT scanning. You should consider earlier testing if you have: a family history of early heart disease, diabetes, elevated cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, current or former smoker, or prolonged exposure to second hand smoke. Once heart disease is established, your calcium score should be checked on an annual basis, the calcium score gives you critical information as to how you are responding to therapy. The fact is, EBT the only technology that is FDA approved to successfully find the early signs of heart disease while it is at it's most treatable stage.
Get an EBT Heart Scan, Prevent a Heart Attack!, Southern CA (9 May 2009)
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