A calcium scan provides a 'satellite image' of the heart, indicating lifetime damage and serving as an adjunct indicator of overall risk of dying from a heart attack.

“You know, simple inexpensive and we'll start there and then we'll see. Sometimes CT angography is important. clearly is a great scan. I use it a lot. Uh but I always start with the basics. Let's get a CAC scan. Let's see where you're at and then let's go from there.”

“And so he developed a quantitative measure And that's called the coronary artery calcium scan or score. And that is a low dose, low dose radiation screening test that basically just looks for this one thing, which is calcium.”

“coronary calcium is a an important step forward in cardiovascular imaging and it's a process where you can accurately and and pretty safely determine using x-ray techniques whether there's calcium bone in the coronary arteries”

“calcium scans are great ways to kind of uh the way the analogy I use for my patients is that it's a you know sort of a satellite image of your of your heart and gives you a sense of has there been damage there over over your lifetime uh and what and then also gives you a nice adjunct indicator of your overall risk of dying from a heart attack”

“and that's why much later in the disease calcium starts to get deposited in this cap plaque and that's maybe somewhat fortunate because being radio Opa that enables the type of Imaging studies we have now to say oh my goodness there's calcium in your artery wall which there's only one cause and that's atherosclerosis”

“then you can sort of think about understanding hey has there been any damage done to date and here's where a calcium scan or a CAC can be a very helpful test”