Detecting Coronary Artery Disease

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- For the more than 13 million Americans with coronary artery disease, diagnosis may have just gotten easier. According to a report in the journal Radiology, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can detect blocked arteries with 88-percent accuracy without the need for an invasive procedure.

Currently, doctors rely on coronary angiography to diagnose the condition. While the method is accurate, it is invasive. The procedure involves feeding a catheter through a blood vessel up to the heart and then releasing a contrast agent to help detect a blockage. A simple, non-invasive method would allow people for whom there is no blockage to avoid going through this procedure unnecessarily.

Doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston investigated the usefulness of the new imaging procedure in 46 patients who suffered from chest pain. All were scheduled to have the standard angiography performed as well.

Doctors injected the study participants with a contrast material and then performed an MRI at timed intervals to look for existing arterial blockage and damage to heart tissue.

The traditional angiography procedure detected coronary artery disease in 30 of the patients. The MRI detected the condition in 88 percent of those individuals. In patients with one diseased vessel, the noninvasive approach was 96-percent accurate. It demonstrated 90-percent accuracy in detecting disease in patients who had undergone previous bypass surgery.

With these encouraging results and the safety of the procedure, researchers believe the new approach can be used to enhance clinical decision-making and guide disease management.

They add further multi-center studies are needed to fully establish the diagnostic accuracy of this method.

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SOURCE: Radiology, 2006;240:39-45