An advisory committee convened by the American Heart Association’s Council on Clinical Cardiology and Council on Cardiovascular Radiology and Intervention suggests that cardiac scans that use ionizing radiation should be used judiciously, as risks of the procedure are not fully known yet.

 

Moreover, the panel wrote in the Feb. 2 online issue of the journal Circulation that people without chest pain or other symptoms who are at low risk for heart disease should not use cardiac scans.

“A patient who is at low risk of having heart disease and who has no symptoms suggestive of heart disease, we really don't think they should have these scans,” said Dr. Thomas Gerber of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida.

Gerber headed the American Heart Association panel that wrote the scientific advisory.

 

CT imaging has become very popular in the last few years and is being heavily marketed directly to the public. These scans are used to see whether a person’s heart arteries have plaque in them. But at the same time, patients can be getting radiation equal to 600 chest x-rays, or about 12 milliSievert (mSv) of radiation, according to a report in this week’ issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

On the other hand, traditional angiography, in which a catheter is snacked through a blood vessel and dye is injected near the heart, exposes patients to roughly half the dose of CT scan or about 5-8 mSv, said study author Jorg Hausleiter, M.D., of the University of Munich in Germany.