CT Examination of the Heart/Calcium Scoring

Cross-sectional diagnostic procedures like computer tomography offer greater clarity and more detail about internal organs, bones, soft tissues, and blood vessels than normal X-ray examinations.

The presence of calcified plaques in the heart’s coronary arteries is the result of a build-up of fat and other material deposited on the inner artery wall. These deposits can calcify and promote the onset of atherosclerosis (a disease of the vascular walls), also known as coronary artery disease (CAD).

By determining your calcium score with a CT scan of your heart, we can detect whether plaques are present and if so to what extent, even if you haven’t noticed any symptoms yet. Calcium is regarded as a marker for plaque. Thus, the amount of calcium on a cardiac CT scan is recorded and evaluated/measured using a helpful prognostic tool (plaque detection program). The higher the calcium level, the more plaque has already accumulated in your vessels and the greater the risk of having a heart attack. Based on your calcium value (calcium score), a prognosis can be made for the next five to ten years. The examination takes five to ten minutes.

This examination provides additional information to the cardiological examination. As these are two completely different examination methods with independent results, they complement each other. The combination of both results allows a more precise analysis of your heart.

Determining your calcium score without any other examination is not sufficient to exclude or detect possible narrowing of the coronary arteries. But it does provide the opportunity to measure risk factors for heart disease, such as calcifications so that further meaningful examinations can be performed based on the results and demographic factors.

The calcium score is based on the following factors: Older than 45 years, family history, high blood pressure, high cholesterol level, overweight, diabetes, and smoking status.