Why ‘normal’ heart scans may be missing risk in women
Risk thresholds were developed around male hearts. Women with less arterial plaque have heart attacks at the same rate as men Your coronary artery scan may come back showing a modest level plaque and no immediate cause for alarm. For many women, this is where the conversation ends, but a new study of nearly 4,300 patients found that women experience major adverse cardiac events (from which they are more than twice as likely to die) at the same rate as men, despite consistently lower plaque readings. The problem is that what counts as a "normal" scan may differ for men and women. Women's coronary arteries are smaller, so even modest plaque deposits take up a larger share of the vessel. When researchers measured plaque as a percentage of arterial cross-sectional area rather than raw volume, the gap in plaque levels between the sexes narrowed, but the risk of heart attac...