This could have spotted my plaque buildup and been able to take preventive measures.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=154596&CultureCode=en
Researchers at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the
University of Edinburgh, have shown how a radioactive agent developed
in the 1960s to detect bone cancer can be re-purposed to highlight the
build-up of unstable calcium deposits in arteries, a process that can
cause heart attack and stroke. The technique, reported in the journal
Nature Communications, could help in the diagnosis of these conditions
in at-risk patients and in the development of new medicines.
Atherosclerosis – hardening of the arteries – is a potentially
serious condition where arteries become clogged by a build-up of fatty
deposits known as ‘plaques’. One of the key constituents in these
deposits is calcium. In some people, pieces from the calcified artery
can break away – if the artery supplies the brain or heart with blood,
this can lead to stroke or heart attack.
“Hardening, or ‘furring’, of the arteries can lead to very serious
disease, but it’s not clear why the plaques are stable in some people
but unstable in others,” explains Professor David Newby, the BHF John
Wheatley Professor of Cardiology at the Centre for Cardiovascular
Science, University of Edinburgh. “We need to find new methods of
identifying those patients at greatest risk from unstable plaques.”
The researchers injected patients with sodium fluoride that had been
tagged with a tiny amount of a radioactive tracer. Using a combination
of scanning techniques (positron emission tomography (PET) and computed
tomography (CT)), the researchers were able to track the progress of the
tracer as it moved around the body.
“Sodium fluoride is commonly found in toothpaste as it binds to
calcium compounds in our teeth’s enamel,” says Dr Anthony Davenport from
the Department of Experimental Medicine and Immunotherapeutics at the
University of Cambridge, who led the study. “In a similar way, it also
binds to unstable areas of calcification in arteries and so we’re able
to see, by measuring the levels of radioactivity, exactly where the
deposits are building up. In fact, this new emerging technique is the
only imaging platform that can non-invasively detect the early stages of
calcification in unstable atherosclerosis.”
Following their sodium fluoride scans, the patients had surgery to
remove calcified plaques and the extracted tissue was imaged, this time
at higher resolution, using a laboratory PET/CT scanner and an electron
microscope. This confirmed that the radiotracer accumulates in areas of
active, unstable calcification whilst avoiding surrounding tissue.
Dr James Rudd, a cardiologist and researcher from the Department of
Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Cambridge adds: “Sodium
fluoride is a simple and inexpensive radiotracer that should
revolutionise our ability to detect dangerous calcium in the arteries of
the heart and brain. This will allow us to use current treatments more
effectively, by giving them to those patients at highest risk. In
addition, after further work, it may be possible to use this technique
to test how well new medicines perform at preventing the development of
atherosclerosis.”
The Wellcome Trust provided the majority of support for this study,
with additional contributions from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer
Research UK and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-research-allows-doctors-to-image-dangerous-hardening-of-the-arteries
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