A new research suggests that heart scans for patients that experience chest pains could cut attack rates and also save thousands of lives. The research was published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the European Society of Cardiology’s Annual Congress in Munich.
These life-saving scans help to spot the people with heart disease so that they can be given proper appropriate treatment to prevent heart attacks. The research team suggests that the current guidelines for diagnosis and treatment should be updated to include the scans into routine care.
For this SCOT-HEART study, researchers tracked more than 4000 patients who were referred to a hospital clinic in the past with symptoms of angina, which is a condition where the blood supply to the heart is restricted.
Half of these patients went through a scan called a computed tomography angiogram (CTA) in addition to other, standard diagnostic tests. After the patients received the scans, the number of those suffering a heart attack within the next five years dropped by 40 per cent, found the study.
The number of patients who underwent additional procedures increased within the first year but had levelled out itself by the end of the five-year period. This clearly indicates that incorporating the scans in routine care would prevent costly tests or additional heart surgery.
Patients who are at a high risk of getting a heart attack are frequently diagnosed with a test called an angiogram. This test involves inserting tubes into the body and heart to check the flow of the blood and identify any obstructions that could potentially lead to heart attack risk.
CTA scans help doctors to look at the blood vessels from outside the body, but without having to insert tubes into the heart. The scans are significantly cheaper, quicker and safer than the angiograms. The study had also found that nearly a quarter of patients had their diagnoses reclassified after they had received the scan, which prompted new treatments in many cases. This is the first study to determine how the scans impact long-term survival rates.
Professor David Newby, from the BHF Centre for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh, and lead researcher of the study said, “This relatively simple heart scan ensures that patients get the right treatment. This is the first time that CT guided management has been shown to improve patient outcomes with a major reduction in the future risk of heart attacks. This has major implications for how we now investigate and manage patients with suspected heart disease.”