In-house CT-scanners are hard to come by in outpatient cardiology offices, despite their known effectiveness and accuracy in identifying early stages of heart disease.
A recent wave of cardiologists are looking to change that. Alberto Morales, MD, founder of South Tampa (Fla.) Cardiology, is an advanced imaging cardiologist. He founded his facility about three years ago with an in-house 64-slice CT scanner and has conducted thousands of scans on his patients with the goal of catching heart disease in early, often asymptomatic stages.
“My initial suspicion was that these are asymptomatic patients in a pretty wealthy population — they probably don’t have significant heart disease,” he told Becker’s. “And what I found was astonishing.”
Dr. Morales found that among patients between ages 50 and 60, 80% had heart disease. Among those patients, 30% to 40% had significant, advanced disease, sometimes 70% to 80% blockages — all completely asymptomatic.
He and his team began treating these patients aggressively, Dr. Morales said, and given the high quality of the scans, and the reduced dosages of radiation and contrast, decided to re-scan these patients after a round of treatment.
“And oftentimes, we saw 80% blockages go down to 50%, 60% blockages go down to 40%,” he said. “We saw a significant pattern, something that no one in the population is doing for these patients.”
He has since continued this diagnostic and treatment process with 40- to 50-year-old patients, and found that up to 70% of that population had heart disease. Among 30- to 40-year-olds, 40% had heart disease, according to Dr. Morales.
Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville, Texas, also recently added a 512-slice CT scanner to enhance early detection and treatment of cardiovascular disease with the goal of expanding access to advanced, noninvasive cardiac assessments in the Rio Grande Valley region.
“This technology represents a major leap forward in our ability to diagnose and treat heart disease with speed, precision and safety,” Guillermo Salinas, MD, interventional cardiologist at Valley Regional, said in a Sept. 5 news release.
