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.
