Study: Scans rule out heart attacks faster

ORLANDO, Fla. – A CT scan – a kind of super X-ray – provides a faster, cheaper way to diagnose a heart attack when someone goes to the emergency room with chest pains, a new study suggests.

About 6 million people each year go to hospitals with chest pain, but only a small fraction are truly having a heart attack. CT scans increasingly are used to diagnose problems because they give a deep, detailed view inside the body. But they put out a lot of radiation, which might raise a person’s chances of developing cancer.

Whether these scans are worth that risk is unknown. The new study suggests that for ruling out heart attacks in the emergency room, they just might be.

The research involved 749 chest pain sufferers at 16 big medical centers around the country. These were people who did not have clear signs of a heart attack from blood tests or EKGs, but doctors are afraid to send them home without more tests.

Between 4 percent and 13 percent of such patients will have a missed diagnosis of a heart attack, and up to one quarter of that group will die, the new study’s leader, Dr. Kavitha Chinnaiyan said.