About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Results
By Mayo Clinic staffAfter your heart scan is finished, your doctor will share the results with you. If you'd like a copy of your scan, ask your doctor, since copies aren't routinely given. If your coronary calcium score is high, that may mean you need more aggressive treatment of your heart attack risk factors, such as medications or lifestyle changes. Your doctor may also recommend more-invasive tests, such as coronary angiography, based on your scan results.
The theory behind using heart scans is that the more calcification you have, the worse your heart disease. But even having very small amounts of calcium might indicate that you could go on to develop heart disease unless you take aggressive measures to stop it, such as eating a healthier diet, reducing your cholesterol and quitting smoking.
Having calcium in your coronary arteries may not necessarily mean that you have heart disease. It's possible you could have false-positive results, meaning there's an error on the scan. That means you might get unnecessary and invasive tests, such as coronary angiography, that could cause you to worry needlessly about your health.
The flip side is also true: If a heart scan shows your arteries are free of calcium, it doesn't necessarily mean you don't have heart disease. The plaques that build up in your arteries are initially soft and only become hard and calcified over time. So you can still have significant plaques clogging your arteries, and the scan won't detect them. These false-negative test results can give you a clean bill of health when you actually have heart disease or are at risk of developing it.
- Greenland P, et al. ACCF/AHA 2007 clinical expert consensus document on coronary artery calcium scoring by computed tomography in global cardiovascular risk assessment and in evaluation of patients with chest pain. Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 2007;49:378.
- Screening for coronary heart disease: Recommendation statement. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/uspstf/uspsacad.htm. Accessed Aug. 10, 2010.
- Coronary calcium scan. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/cscan/cscan_all.html. Accessed Aug. 10, 2010.
- Bonow RO. Should coronary calcium screening be used in cardiovascular prevention strategies? New England Journal of Medicine. 2009;361:990.
- Nieman K, et al. Comparison of the value of coronary calcium detection to computed tomographic angiography and exercise testing in patients with chest pain. The American Journal of Cardiology. 2009;104:1499.
- Shaw LJ, et al. Induced cardiovascular procedural costs and resource consumption patterns after coronary artery calcium screening. Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 2010;54:1258.
- Cademartiri F, et al. Coronary calcium score and computed tomography coronary angiography in high-risk asymptomatic subjects: Assessment of diagnostic accuracy and prevalence of non-obstructive coronary artery disease. European Radiology. 2010;20:846.
Find Mayo Clinic on