Coronary calcium testing predicts future heart ailments

For the study, Detrano and his colleagues performed coronary calcium scanning on 6,722 men and women at sites in Los Angeles, New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Paul, Minn., and Forsythe County, N.C. Thirty-nine percent of the participants were Caucasian, 28 percent African-American, 22 percent Hispanics and 12 percent Chinese. Participants entered the study without cardiovascular disease and were followed for an average of 3.8 years.

Study co-authors are Nathan D. Wong, of UC Irvine; Dr. Karol Watson of UCLA; Dr. Alan D. Guerci of St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, N.Y.; Dr. J. Jeffrey Carr and Dr. Gregory Burke of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C.; Dr. Diane E. Bild of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Dr. Aaron R. Folsom of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; Kiang Liu of Northwestern University in Chicago; Dr. Steven Shea of Columbia University in New York City; Dr. Moyses Szklo and Dr. David A. Bluemke of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; Dr. Daniel H. O’Leary of Caritas Carney Hospital in Dorchester, Mass.; Russell Tracy of the University of Vermont in Burlington; and Richard Kronmal of the University of Washington in Seattle. A full list of participating investigators and institutions can be found at www.mesa-nhlbi.org.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute funded the study, which is part of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.

About China-California Heart Watch: The mission of the China-California Heart Watch is to research the extent of heart disease in the Chinese countryside near Kunming in Yunnan province, one of the poorest areas of China, to provide free cardiac and preventive care to farmers and to teach Chinese health professionals the basis of preventive cardiac care. For more information, see www.chinacal.org.

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