MRI can predict fatal heart disease



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It can be a non-invasive alternative to echocardiograms, catheterizations and nuclear stress stress tests.

The use of Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to determine cardiac function It has been slow to catch up, but a study by researchers at the Duke University School of Health in Durham, North Carolina, USA, shows that cardiac MRI not only helps diagnose the disease but can predict which cases are potentially fatal.

The results of a large multicenter study suggest that cardiac magnetic resonance, or CMR, for its acronym in English, has the potential to be a non-invasive and nontoxic alternative to echocardiograms, catheterizations and nuclear stress stress tests identify the severity of coronary disease. The details of the work are published in the digital edition of this Friday of the magazine "JAMA cardiology".

"We have known for some time that CMR is effective in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease, but it is not yet commonly used and accounts for less than 1% of the resistance tests used in this country."says author Robert Judd, co-director of the Center for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance of Duke University.

"One of the obstacles to wider use has been the lack of data on its predictive value, something that has the technologies of competition ", said Judd. "Our study provides insights, although direct comparisons between CMR and other technologies are definitive"he adds.

Judd and his colleagues analyzed data from more than 9,000 patients who have undergone a CMR in seven hospitals in the United States, with a follow up of up to 10 years. For patients with no history of cardiac pathology and low risk according to traditional clinical criteria, those with an abnormal CMR scan were 3.4 times more likely to die than patients with a normal CMR scan.

STRONG RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PROOF OF ABNORMAL STRESS AND MORTALITY

For the entire patient population, scientists have discovered a strong association between an abnormal stress CMR and mortalityeven after adjusting the patient's age, gender, and cardiac risk factors.

"The non-invasive cardiac stress tests they are a cornerstone of the clinical management of patients with coronary artery disease known or suspected ", said Judd, noting that the CMR works as well or better than other tests to identify the movement of the heart wall, cell death and the presence of drops in the flow of blood. In addition, technology does not require radiation exposure, which is essential in nuclear resistance tests that are by far the most commonly used in the United States.

"Haand a number of reasons for the limited use of CMR stress, including the availability of good quality labs, excluding patients who can not experience the magnetization and lack of data on patient outcomes suggest that the CMR effort is effective in predicting mortality, we provide a solid foundation for a comparative study between stress CMR and other modalities. "

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