What does severe calcification of the coronary arteries mean?

Coronary artery calcification causes arteries to harden and are less able to expand and contract. This increases the risk of cardiovascular problems.

Coronary artery calcification

causes less blood to reach the heart muscle. Coronary artery calcifications occur when calcium builds up in the arteries that supply blood to the heart.

This buildup can cause coronary artery disease and increase the risk of having a heart attack.

Coronary calcification

occurs when calcium builds up in plaque found in the walls of the coronary arteries, which supply blood to the heart muscle. The presence of coronary calcification may be an early sign of coronary artery disease, which can cause a heart attack. Although fluoroscopy can detect moderate to large calcifications, its ability to identify small calcium deposits is low.

If your doctor diagnoses coronary artery calcifications, you can take steps to prevent more build-up. Recently, clear differences were observed in the occurrence of arterial wall calcification between genetically distinctive inbred mouse strains30, indicating for the first time that there is a genetic component to this clinically significant trait. .

Coronary artery calcification

was previously thought to be a benign process, and calcific injury increases with aging.

There are four published studies on sensitivities and specificities with respect to angiography that included comparisons of radiographic coronary calcifications and the results of exercise tests in the same symptomatic subjects. Often, these conditions can cause a person to develop coronary artery calcifications at a much younger age. There are several types of stress tests, including treadmill or bicycle stress tests, nuclear stress tests, exercise echocardiography, and chemically induced stress tests. However, BCE has been shown to be accurate enough to predict the presence of angiographic stenosis somewhere in the coronary arteries and to predict the likelihood of clinical endpoints occurring in symptomatic patients.

This may help explain why calcification alone is not an ideal prognostic indicator of plaque rupture in heterogeneous populations13 and is compatible with the high frequency of calcification seen in older populations, 444546, which tend to have the highest plaque burden. In a histopathological investigation, Clarkson et al.49 demonstrated that plaques with microscopic evidence of mineralization were much larger and associated with much larger coronary arteries than sections without microscopic evidence of calcification; this was true both in humans and in non-human primates. Calcification can be detected in some mild or moderate stenotic plaques, which some believe are the type most likely to rupture and cause coronary syndromes,2 while Cheng et al39 suggest that a calcified plaque itself is less likely, not more, to rupture. Table 1, adapted from Detrano and Froelicher,61, summarizes seven studies that examined the fluoroscopic detection of coronary calcification in 2670 patients undergoing coronary arteriography.

Read on to discover why and how coronary artery calcification occurs, as well as tips for prevention and treatment. .