He was the picture of health. She did all the right things. Sometimes that’s what you hear after someone suffers a heart attack. But heart attacks can happen to people who seem like they have no symptoms.
“And the model was placed on them called SMuRFs,” said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, an interventional cardiologist at Intermountain Health. But Dr. Anderson doesn’t mean the little blue cartoon characters.
SMuRF is an acronym for standard modifiable risk factors which include, “smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar.”
In cardiology terms, SMuRFs infiltrate your arteries. But one in four or five heart attack victims have no SMuRFs. Medical science can’t say why these people still suffer, but they have a way of helping identify some of them before a heart attack.
“The calcium score in the arteries, has become a very important additional risk factor,” said Anderson.
Calcium score is a number from zero, great…into the thousands, which is not great…but great to know. They scan your body for the things that might block your blood from reaching the heart.
Geologists have a term – braided rivers. A braided river flows through a field of rocks and boulders. The water strikes rocks in its path with relentless force, eventually pushing them downstream and changing its path. Calcium deposits are like boulders, except when they block the stream, the blood can’t change course.
Anderson and his colleagues used Intermountain data to find heart attack patients who had a scan.
“We were able to find a going back, you know, I think 10 to 20 years, 429 patients with heart attacks that had this coronary calcium scan, and of those we found that 60% were so called SMuRFless. They didn't have in their records history of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar or smoking.”
Most of those scans were used to confirm a patient was having a heart attack. The same scans can find calcium build up in a patient who never had a heart attack.
“Our conclusion was that we ought to expand the application of coronary calcium scans, they're not that expensive,” said Anderson.
Around $100. Not much for an important warning that can lead to prevent or simply peace of mind.
“If you have a zero score, wonderful, keep going and repeat in five years, it will make sure that you're staying in low-risk areas,” said Anderson.
Dr. Anderson recommends men over 40 and women over 50 consider getting a coronary calcium CT scan. You can find out more and schedule a scan here, or by asking your medical provider.
