Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
What you can expect
By Mayo Clinic staff
During the procedure
A heart scan takes only a few minutes. The scan is noninvasive — it requires no needles, cutting or medications to make you fall asleep or relax. The scan will show the calcium in your heart arteries by a using computerized tomography (CT) scan.
A CT scan is an X-ray technique that produces images of your internal organs that are more detailed than are those produced by conventional X-ray exams. CT scans use an X-ray generating device that rotates around your body and a very powerful computer to create cross-sectional images, like slices, of the inside of your body.
Calcium deposits show up as bright white spots on the scan. The standard imaging technique for coronary arteries uses electron beam computerized tomography (EBCT, also called ultra-fast CT).
Before the scan, you may be asked to change into a hospital gown, although some facilities don't require it. You'll lie on a table with a few electrodes attached to your chest. The table will slide into the CT scanner, which creates the images. You may be asked to hold your breath for a few seconds so that the technicians can get clear images of your heart. After a few minutes, your doctor or technician will have a score that helps estimate your heart attack risk — and may help guide treatment.
In addition to identifying calcium, CT scans can produce detailed pictures of your heart arteries to show the presence any narrowing (stenosis) of your heart arteries due to coronary artery disease. For this type of cardiac CT, dye is injected into a vein to visualize the coronary arteries (called CT angiography).
After the procedure
There aren't any special precautions you need to take after having a heart scan. You should be able to drive yourself home and continue your daily activities.
- Screening for coronary heart disease: Recommendation statement. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/uspstf/uspsacad.htm. Accessed Oct. 7, 2008.
- Budoff MJ, et al. Assessment of coronary artery disease by cardiac computed tomography: A scientific statement from the American Heart Association Committee on Cardiovascular Imaging and Intervention, Council on Cardiovascular Radiology and Intervention, and Committee on Cardiac Imaging, Council on Clinical Cardiology. Circulation. 2006;114(16):1761-1791.
- Greenland P, et al. ACCF/AHA 2007 clinical expert consensus document on coronary artery calcium scoring by computed tomography in global cardiovascular risk assessment and in evaluation of patients with chest pain. Circulation. 2007;115(3):402-426.
- Coronary calcium scan. National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/cscan/cscan_all.html. Accessed Oct. 7, 2008.
- Detrano R, et al. Coronary calcium as a predictor of coronary events in four racial or ethnic groups. New England Journal of Medicine. 2008;358(13):1336-1345.
- Weintraub WS, et al. Predicting cardiovascular events with coronary calcium scoring. New England Journal of Medicine. 2008;358(13):1394-1396.
- Gerber TC. Diagnostic and prognostic implications of coronary artery calcification detected by computed tomography. http://www.uptodate.com/index. Accessed Oct. 10, 2008.
- Yanowitz FG. Screening for coronary heart disease. http://www.uptodate.com/index. Accessed Oct. 10, 2008.
