JimRB: That's an interesting link. I'll have to do more research on it. Lots of variables and heart pathology that would confound a device like that. What about a aortic or mitral valve stenosis, which are relatively common? How would the murmur from either affect that device? Anyway, it's an interesting idea.
deere755: Glad you're doing OK. The way some doctors say things to patients isn't always the best. Most of the time they just don't want to make it too complicated but aren't good at explaining in layman's terms.
I'm a radiologist, a doctor who interprets all kinds of imaging studies, including having training interpreting cardiac nuclear medicine stress tests and the CT scans someone mentioned. When you get these studies, most of the time they are interpreted by me, then your doctor tells you what I saw. When he/she says, "This is what I saw on your scan", really what they are saying is, "This is what the radiologist report says". Most of the time the primary care doctor wouldn't know where to start in reading the scan. Some kinds of chest CT's have 1500 images to look at. That said, sometimes cardiologists read stress tests.
If anyone is interested, nuclear medicine cardiac stress tests work by taking "pictures" of your heart with a gamma camera (a radiation detector) after intravenous injection with a weakly radioactive material that localizes in muscle, incl. heart muscle. The test is done at rest one day, and while under stress another day. The stress can be either by a treadmill or by a drug that "stresses" your heart. The rest and stress portions of the scan are compared and the amount of muscle contraction in the various portions of the heart wall/muscle can then be compared. If a part the heart muscle is not contracting, it can be inferred that it is not getting enough bloodflow or dead muscle from a previous heart attack. It gets a bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic version.
A CT scan of the heart is totally different physiologically than a stress test. That kind of CT has only been technically feasible in the past few years. It takes thin slice pictures of your chest while getting injected with IV iodine-based contrast. The contrast goes into your coronary arteries which supply the heart muscle. Unlike the stress test which can detect wall-motion abnormalities in live muscle which isn't getting enough blood or dead muscle from previous infarcts (heart attacks), this CT scan looks for narrowed spots in the coronary arteries. It has limits (just like other tests), i.e. when there are a lot of calcium deposits from atherosclerosis, the narrowed spots are more difficult to detect because the calcifications cause artifacts. The reason why it's only been technically feasible over the past few years is that the CT scanners were not able to take the "pictures" fast enough to freeze the motion of the heart. Previously there was just too much motion artifact. There are multiple studies evaluating the accuracy of CT angiograms vs. conventional angiograms which are the gold standard. Medicare paying for the scans has also been a holdup. Then there are turf battles: In this case (as in several other emerging tests), the radiologists developed this naturally as our scanning equipment got faster. To me it's just another blood vessel that I can now see better, just like the other arteries that we've been scanning for a long time. Then the cardiologists, who see the patients in clinic and who order the scans, said that they want to interpret everything that involves the heart. There are no laws that say a radiologist has to interpret the scan, only that you can bill the insurance/medicare once for an interpretation. So they take a short course where they interpret 50 scans and proclaim themselves experts. That worked for only a few scans at our hospital, when they didn't know what was going on on the rest of the scan outside the heart and missed potentially deadly findings on a patient, i.e. blood clots in the lungs, and the scan didn't get interpreted for 2 days either (whereas I see scans within minutes to a few hours after completion, depending how urgent it is). Then they wanted us to "overread" their reports -- interpret everything on the scan except the heart. HAHA. I'm not going to read 1500 images for free and I'm not going to ignore part of the scan. There's a reason why radiology residency is 5 years long after med school. The reason why I write this is that this situation is happening all over the USA currently. As beneficial technology is invented, if there is money to be made, there will be hands in the pot. Anyway, end of my rant.
While I don't know anything about you and I don't want to step on anyone's toes, there are ways of *reversing* heart disease, like the CHIP program. It's based on diet, exercise, faith/meditation, weight loss, and stopping smoking. When possible, changing lifestyle is much better than surgical or pharmaceutical management of disease. There's an interesting thread on heart healthy living somewhere on this forum. All the best to you!
Marcus
I will see my doctor for my mostly annual physical and I'm going to inquire about imaging. I remember when Mayor Daley of Chicago died after leaving his doctor's office and I wondered if it was after undergoing a stress test. There are places that advertise on the radio CT scans for $300 or so and they include testimonials from people whose lives were saved by the scan. I can handle the $300.