24-02-2025
Ask A Specialist: Calcium Score Test
HONOLULU (KHON2) — February is National Heart Month, a good time to show your heart some love by taking a Calcium Score Test, a simple scan that can go a long way to maintaining a healthy heart.'It's a CT scan that is available for the heart. It doesn't use any contrast or any IV. There's no amount of radiation. We take pictures of someone's heart, and it'll show us how much calcium patients have in their heart vessels which is cholesterol plaques that have deposited over time,' said Dr. Mahdi Veillet-Chowdhury, cardiologist, Queen's Heart Institute at The Queen's Medical Center. 'As cardiologists, that's very important information for us to know.'
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Veillet-Chowdhury said cardiologists want to get all the information possible to understand a patient's risk of having a heart attack or stroke.
'The Calcium Score Test is the most powerful prognostic tool we have. We use it for primary prevention. So, we're trying to prevent a future event. It tells us what the actual disease process is, not what your risk is necessarily. So, when we see calcium, it alerts us that maybe we have to be more aggressive with your medications. Conversely, sometimes this is helpful to determine if we're overmedicating patients. Sometimes, this test leads us to de-escalate some of the care because they're actually at lower risk than we previously determined,' said Veillet-Chowdhury.
The Calcium Score Test is covered by insurance for those who meet the guidelines.
'I usually reserve the test for patients who are about 40 years old. Patients who have risk factors such as diabetes, obesity, smoking, family history of heart attack or stroke, patients who have high cholesterol. It helps us to understand the long-term risk, so we can have more tailored therapy, more precision-type medicine to guide their therapy, individualized to that patient,' said Veillet-Chowdhury. 'This is a great test. It helps me to work with their primary care doctors to give a comprehensive evaluation for their long-term heart health.'
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To learn more about the services provided by Queen's Heart Institute, call (808) 691-8900.
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