Study includes:
A. Calcium Score
B. CT Coronary Angiogram

Detects:
Measures the amount of calcium in the coronary artery walls and provides a numeric score that evaluates risk of heart disease relative to patients age/gender category. Smart Heart & Health is the leader in also providing a CT coronary coronary artery score in addition to the calcium score.

A: Calcium Score:

Why should you consider more than a calcium score? Why not just a calcium score?

While obtaining a calcium score is helpful to assess your risk for coronary artery disease it only reveals part of the picture. A calcium score gives you a numeric “score” by quantifing the amount of calcium in the walls of your coronary arteries. A high score does reveal a statistically significant risk for heart

disease but it does not give you an absolute conclusion by any means. Until now, technology permitted only the imaging of calcium in the walls of the coronary arteries. If you compare a coronary artery to a pipe, just imaging calcium is equivalent to looking only at the paint on the wall of the pipe to see if a block exists. Our Siemens multi-detector row spiral CT (MDCT) scanner together with the propriety techniques developed at Smart Heart & Health enable us to be one of the only facilities that can non-invasively detect not only calcium in the artery walls, but, even more important, non-calcified soft plaque by looking at the actual lumen (arterial channel) of all the coronary arteries.

“In most asymptomatic individuals it is usually the unstable soft plaque that ruptures without warning, causing a heart attack or stroke. By finding it early and initiating aggressive lifestyle changes and interventional therapies, we can potentially prevent thousands of premature deaths,” says Bradley A. Jabour, M.D., medical director of Smart Heart & Health. At Smart Heart & Health our Smart Heart Exam consists of a calcium score as well as a CT angiogram of your coronary arteries making it the most comprehensive, non-invasive CT scan of the heart available.

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B: CT Coronary Angiogram:

Detects:
The Smart Heart Scan does not only look for calcium in the arterial walls, but also consists of a noninvasive CT coronary angiogram that visualize the actual arterial channel or lumen. The CT angiogram performed on the Smart Heart & Health’s Multi Detector CT scanner (MDCT) is

unique in that it can accurately image all of the coronary arteries, thereby detecting the unstable and life threatening soft plaque that projects into the lumen and creates narrowing in the arterial channels. The soft plaques are often non calcified and thus not detected on simple calcium screening exams.

Preparation:

1. No food or drink for 4 hours before the test.
   
2. Must have a recent creatinine level to test kidney function if over 55 years of age, since I.V. contrast is utilized. We will perform the creatinine test at Smart Heart & Health as part of our scan if you do not have this information available.

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