What would you do if you could pinpoint the day you were going to have a heart attack? What about if you could stop it from happening altogether? Well, you don’t need a crystal ball or time machine. Modern scanning technologies can give you accurate and useful information for looking after your heart, says Dr Warrick Bishop, cardiologist and author of Have You Planned Your Heart Attack? “The opportunity to look into someone’s heart and look at the health of their arteries, before they’ve had an event, is a game changer,” Dr Bishop says.

Weighing up the risks

Most heart health tests calculate the risk of an individual based on a number of health factors – including cholesterol levels and blood pressure – and giving them a percentage that indicates how likely they are to have a Major Adverse Cardiovascular Event (MACE) within the next five to ten years. “A risk calculator doesn’t predict the risk for an individual patient. Rather, it provides the rate events occur in a group of 100 individuals with the same characteristics. This does not tell us who of the 100 will have an event,” says Dr Bishop. Traditionally, a five percent chance of heart attack has been classified as ‘low risk’, something that Dr Bishop wants people to reevaluate. Read the full article My vision is that imaging will be incorporated into a more holistic approach, to improve the way we deal with the potential risk many individuals carry in regard to coronary artery disease. Dr Warrick Bishop