By: Diana Barnes-Brown for Heart1
A team of medical researchers at the Mayo Clinic recently discovered the benefits of a simple device, known as an arterial tonometer, to detect arterial stiffness and its association with levels of coronary artery calcium. The device significantly improved their ability to predict heart disease in adults without symptoms.
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Possible signs of heart disease include:
Chest pain (angina)
Shortness of breath
Swelling of the lower extremities (edema)
Pain when walking (claudication)
High blood pressure and high cholesterol
While not all occurrences of these symptoms lead to heart problems, it’s always best to play it safe when it comes to heart health. If you experience one or more of the signs of heart disease, talk to your doctor or health care provider as soon as possible in order to rule out serious illness and get on the road to feeling better.
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The findings appear in a study printed in the current issue of Hypertension, an American Heart Association journal. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Michigan collaborated on this research. “Importantly,” they stated, “the results provide evidence that [the technique] improves the ability to predict the presence and quantity” of factors leading to heart disease.
The test is known as aortic pulse wave velocity (aPWV). It measures how rapidly the pulse travels down the aorta, which is the large artery leading away from the heart. The test only takes about 15 minutes, is completely non-invasive and lest costly than many other tests used to screen for heart disease. During the test, the patient simply lies down on a bed or examining table and tonometers, small devices which resemble pencils, are placed on the skin at the carotid artery and the femoral artery (large arteries in the neck and thigh, respectively). Then the tonometers feed data on pulse vibrations back to a computer, which calculates the length of the pulse waves. Patients with slower waves have more elastic, healthier arteries and patients with faster waves have stiffer, less healthy arteries. The researchers discovered that those with stiffer arteries had more calcium deposits in their coronary arteries, which is a sign of the plaque buildup (also known as coronary atherosclerosis) that can cause heart failure. A total of 401 participants (213 men and 188 women) from ages 32 to 84, none of whom had a history of heart attack or stroke, took part in the study.
The study also discussed the connection between the aortic pulse wave velocity and smoking, reporting that coronary atherosclerosis was present more frequently and in larger quantity in those who had a history of smoking.
If the usefulness of aPWV screening continues to be supported by medical research trials, the new technique may become a matter of course for screening high-risk patients, such as those with family history of heart disease, those with high blood pressure, or those with kidney disease. And, of course, many patients will breathe a collective sigh of relief upon learning that their heart checkups in the future will be quick and comfortable.
