Heart Attack or Something Else?

Reported February 2006

BALTIMORE (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- You have a 50-percent chance of suffering from a heart problem, but how do you know the pain you're feeling is the real thing? Now, a new technique may help save lives and explain unexplainable chest pain, long after the pain is gone away.

Michele Lawson hopes her steady pace during a stress test will reveal why recent chest pain has gone from bad to worse. "It's been radiating down in my arm and into my hands," she tells Ivanhoe.

The best time for diagnosing chest pain is usually right after it happens. Today, however, time is on Michele's side. A new stress test tells doctors the cause of chest pain up to 30 hours after it happens.

Vasken Dilsizian, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, says, "It opens up the window of opportunity of imaging these patients way after the chest pain has disappeared."

After the heart rate is increased, patients are injected with a new, radioactive imaging tracer. It remembers and reveals any reduced blood flow to the heart. "The whole idea of assessing these patients is to predict those who are going to have a heart attack and hopefully intervene before the heart attack occurs," Dr. Dilsizian says.

Cardiologists then use a SPECT, or single-photon emission computed tomography scan to see the tracer. The tracer helps determine non-life threatening causes of chest pain, like indigestion, while catching patients who may be in real danger.

"We don't have to guess anymore whether the chest pain the patient is experiencing is, indeed, related to the heart or not," Dr. Dilsizian says. Michele's not guessing; her scan results revealed a healthy heart.

The new imaging tracer is not yet FDA approved, but is in on-going, multi-center clinical trials for further testing.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

University of Maryland Medical Center
22 South Greene Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
(800) 492-5538
TDD: (410) 328-9600

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