Coronary artery calcium scoring is a consistent, reproducible, and cost-effective method for assessing risk of major cardiovascular outcomes in asymptomatic individuals to guide primary prevention.
Does coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring effectively assess risk for major cardiovascular outcomes in asymptomatic people?
Coronary artery calcium scoring is a valuable and cost-effective tool for cardiovascular risk stratification and guiding primary prevention interventions like statins and aspirin in asymptomatic individuals.
Coronary artery calcium (CAC) is a highly specific feature of coronary atherosclerosis. On the basis of single-center and multicenter clinical and population-based studies with short-term and long-term outcomes data (up to 15-year follow-up), CAC scoring has emerged as a widely available, consistent, and reproducible means of assessing risk for major cardiovascular outcomes, especially useful in asymptomatic people for planning primary prevention interventions such as statins and aspirin. CAC testing in asymptomatic populations is cost effective across a broad range of baseline risk. This review summarizes evidence concerning CAC, including its pathobiology, modalities for detection, predictive role, use in prediction scoring algorithms, CAC progression, evidence that CAC changes the clinical approach to the patient and patient behavior, novel applications of CAC, future directions in scoring CAC scans, and new CAC guidelines.
Greenland et al. (2018) conducted a review in Coronary atherosclerosis. Coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring was evaluated on Major cardiovascular outcomes. Coronary artery calcium scoring is a consistent, reproducible, and cost-effective method for assessing risk of major cardiovascular outcomes in asymptomatic individuals to guide primary prevention.