I believe that heart attacks are preventable, but there are steps and there is information you need to understand to get there. But let's take a step back and let's think about the history.
What I'm going to talk about is scanning the heart. And one of the things we do, scanning the heart, is looking for calcium within the arteries. So what's the background to that? Interestingly, back in 1927 a fellow called Link first described calcification in the arteries of living subjects. That's nearly 100 years ago. So this idea of knowing that we might find calcium in arteries is not new. In about 1960 or thereabouts, a couple of researchers in the United States looked at taking X-rays of cadavers who died from coronary or heart attack, and they found 80% of those patients had calcium in the arteries, closely or starting to closely link the issue of calcification in arteries with problems with the heart. Some years after that, a group in England led by a doctor called Oliver used fluoroscopy or cine cameras or, if you like, almost video Xray, to look at the heart of subjects with coronary artery disease and found calcification.
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