Many of my patients know of my passion for finding and preventing disease at a very early stage. For this reason many of my patients have spent the money, (approximately $1000) to get a CT Angiogram of their heart. In the last two years since I’ve been ordering this test, I have saved approximately 11 of my patient’s lives. By this, I mean that we found more plaque on their heart than we had ever expected. Procedures, either angioplasty, or in two cases coronary artery bypass surgery fixed the patient’s problem.
Similarly, I have treated patients with high cholesterol who were on statin drugs, who had absolutely no plaque on their angiogram! We were able to take these people are statin drugs. In this day, when the pharmaceutical companies who make statin drugs are implying that everybody should start on statin drugs from age 20 on, this has been a major accomplishment.
I am delighted to tell my patients and friends about a new article that appeared in the January issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology. The title of this article is “Traditional risk assessment tools do not accurately predict coronary heart disease”. In this study over 700 patients were taking Statin drugs because of the increased risk of developing coronary artery disease from the traditional Framingham and NCEP risk assessment tools that doctors use.
The shocking results were that 21% of the patients whose doctors thought they needed statin drugs before the scan (because of their “risk factors”) did not need them. In addition 26% of the patients who were already taking statin drugs had no detectable plaque.
The author of the study Kevin Johnson M.D., concluded “Ultimately the Framinghaminfluences what every physician does, but I feel it is not good enough to show what is happening with each individual patient”. He went on to say “I hope this study gets people interested in finding out better predictors for coronary heart disease”. The CT Angiogram is obviously a better way.
This study and Dr. Johnson’s comments reflect what I have been telling my patience for several years. Looking at traditional risk factors is a good start but this study clearly showed that there is not necessarily a direct correlation of those risk factors with actual plaque formation in the heart arteries.
I refer you to the article which appeared earlier in my newsletter (and is on my blog) on the CT Angiogram. If you are interested in having it done please speak with me at our next appointment.
About Dr. Soram Khalsa
As an MD, Dr Soram specializes in Integrative Medicine combining diet, nutrition, acupuncture, herbs and nutrition. Visit Dr Soram’s Healthy Living Store where you’ll find high-quality nutritional supplements:
