Study finds that coronary calcification helps foretell heart disease risk in certain people better than some traditional risk factors.

To identify which healthy-looking people are headed toward serious heart disease, most physicians classify patients using standard risk factors. These include high blood pressure, smoking, low HDL ("good") cholesterol, family history of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and age. But cardiac experts have been searching for more precise diagnostic tools.

One potential risk-assessment tool is an imaging study called a

Coronary calcium CT scans allow doctors to see calcified atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries (bottom) using a Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP). Newer CT scans also can be used to construct three-dimensional images of a heart to measure the volume of heart chambers, ejection fraction and to find other data (top).

coronary calcium computed tomography (CT) scan, which has been around since the late 1980s. "It was initially promoted as an assessment tool for anyone, but without data [to prove its effectiveness]," says Milind Desai, MD, a staff cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic and assistant professor of medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College…

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