A 15-second test done in the emergency room may help doctors tell whether patients with chest pain are suffering a heart attack or angina.
The scan, called multidetector computed tomography, or MDCT, is meant to allow doctors to see instantly whether patients have blocked or narrowed arteries around the heart.
A buildup of plaque is a sign of acute coronary syndrome or ACS, which includes heart attacks and angina.
"ACS is rare without plaque, so MDCT results may quickly identify a group of patients that can safely be discharged," said the study's lead author, Udo Hoffmann, an assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.
Hoffmann's team studied 41 women and 62 men with an average age of 54 who came to emergency with acute chest pain.
Of the 103 patients, 14 were diagnosed with ACS while in hospital. All of them had major plaque levels on the MDCT scan.
In the 41 patients who did not show significant plaque levels on the scan, none were diagnosed with ACS while in hospital or five months afterward.
"Noninvasive assessment of coronary artery disease by MDCT has good performance characteristics for ruling out ACS in subjects presenting with possible myocardial ischemia [insufficient blood flow to the muscle tissue of the heart] to the emergency department and may be useful for improving early triage," the researchers concluded in Monday's online issue of Circulation, published by the American Heart Association.
Currently, most emergency rooms in the U.S. do not have the equipment or expertise to give the MDCT test.
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