MRI scans best way to identify people at high risk of heart disease

A clinical study at the University of Leeds has found that the best way to identify people at high risk of coronary heart disease following chest pain or angina is an MRI.

The study, which was funded by the British Heart Foundation, compared MRI scans, which does not use potentially dangerous radiation, with SPECT, a procedure which uses ionizing radiation and is commonly used in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease.

The researchers found that MRI was better overall at predicting serious events, such as death of heart attack, following chest pain suspected to be angina. The five-year follow-up study in 750 people was designed to find out the best way of separating patients based on whether they were at high- or low-risk of serious heart events.

The paper, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, resulted from a large five-year follow-up study and follows a series of papers from the original CE-MARC (Clinical Evaluation of Magnetic Resonance imaging in Coronary heart disease) study.

These papers have contributed to the growing body of evidence that cardiac MRI is the best option for the diagnosis and management of patients with coronary heart disease. Earlier evidence from this BHF-funded study also showed that MRI is more cost-effective than SPECT in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease.

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