Heart scan could replace angiogram for some patients

A team of researchers, with funding from the British Heart Foundation, have shown that a heart test using a magnetic scanner could help some patients living with heart failure. Some patients with heart failure have an enlarged heart, a condition called dilated cardiomyopathy. For these patients, it can be difficult to work out if their symptoms are caused by coronary artery disease, or a number of other conditions that can make the heart pump less effectively

Cardiac imaging breakthrough helps determine diminished blood flow to the heart

Research presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine's 57th Annual Meeting is challenging the typical paradigm used to determine whether heart patients will benefit from invasive procedures like stent-placement or open-heart surgery. Current medical practice favors treating patients with coronary atherosclerosis (or hardening of the artery walls due to plaque build-up) with such procedures if a coronary artery is shown to be blocked by 70 percent or more in order to reduce symptoms and potentially prevent heart attack. However, a group of cardiac investigators are now finding that in addition to the degree of blockage, composition of the plaque causing the blockage also has significant impact on coronary artery blood flow. This may help explain why two people with similarly blocked coronary arteries can experience vastly different symptoms - ScienceDaily

Doctors often order heart test but no disease is found (USA)

"A big study says most patients without known heart disease who undergo coronary angiography don't have clogged arteries after all. In such patients angiograms reveal coronary disease only 40 percent of the time. Worse yet, another 40 percent have essentially clear coronaries. The upshot? Medicine's definitive test for diagnosing heart disease doesn't do a very good job in about 200,000 Americans who get it every year - at about $2,500 a pop. The results suggest the test may be used too often. To do an angiogram, or cardiac catheterization, doctors thread a thin tube from the groin up into the coronary arteries. Injecting a dye shows on x-rays whether arteries are gunked-up or clear. More than a million Americans get angiograms every year. One in five angiograms involves a patient without known heart disease - and often no symptoms. The new data come from the biggest study of the question so far - encompassing 400,000 patients with unknown coronary-artery status prior to their angiograms. It draws from a database of the American College of Cardiology, which funded the project. The findings were published in the current New England Journal of Medicine