Early Diagnosis of Heart Disease

The Noninvasive Heart Center also performs preventive examinations. Preventive examinations are a good idea particularly if you have multiple risk factors such as obesity, diabetes, do not exercise, smoke, consume excess alcohol, have a stressful job or a strong family history. Some preventive examinations are useless, even dangerous, such as body scans for calcium because they often lead to invasive tests and unnecessary procedures such as angioplasty or bypass surgery. Others, such as a routine "check up" with a family physician, are also almost always useless because the typical routine examination is not any different than it was 50 years ago, and will not pick up evidence of cardiovascular disease until it is very far advanced when it is often too late to do anything about. Finally, more sophisticated examinations such a stress tests with radioactive imaging are very expensive, and frequently are falsely abnormal because of the marked increase in heart rate and blood pressure that accompany the test. This also often leads to unnecessary angiograms, angioplasty and even bypass surgery in patients without symptoms, but it does make a lot of money for the doctor and hospital. Accordingly, if you are not having any symptoms, but a stress test is abnormal, you should never allow a cardiologist to perform an angiogram just for diagnostic purposes in order to see if you can be treated with angioplasty or bypass surgery. There are alternate and safer noninvasive tests and treatments.

The tests done at the Noninvasive Heart Center are described elsewhere in this web site. They are remarkably sensitive in the early detection of heart disease in individuals who are unaware of its existence. They are also capable of detecting early complications in patients with known heart disease who are not yet symptomatic. The earlier disease, or its complications, are detected in such patients, the more successful is treatment. For further details about preventive examinations, please call our 24 hour answering service at our toll free number at 1-800-673-4361, and leave your name, your area code and telephone number, and the times you can be reached at that number. You will receive a return call usually within 1-2 hours.