{"id":3296,"date":"2016-06-13T15:09:36","date_gmt":"2016-06-13T14:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=3296"},"modified":"2016-10-16T05:28:40","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T04:28:40","slug":"heart-scan-ct-calcium-score","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/13\/heart-scan-ct-calcium-score\/","title":{"rendered":"My heart scan results &#8211; Perfect Score!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For reasons I won&#8217;t bore you with, I was in Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital today for a\u00a0<strong>CT Cardiac \/ Coronary Artery Calcium scan<\/strong> (panic not, as you&#8217;ll see, there&#8217;s nothing to worry about).<\/p>\n<p>Basically this uses a CT scanner to scan the heart and its arteries to look for calcium deposits. Calcium deposits in the arteries are a significant indicator of Coronary Heart Disease, Atheroclerosis and a major predictor of Heart Attacks. Eek!<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Getting a bad calcium score would lead to an angiogram to determine the full extent of narrowing of the arteries due to atherosclerotic plaques, <strong>which are the things that kill you<\/strong> when they break off in your blood stream and find somewhere nice and narrow to get lodged in, like a key heart artery (heart attack) or your brain (stroke).<\/p>\n<p>At this point I possibly should remind you that for about 8 years I&#8217;ve been following a very high cholesterol diet: I eat red meat every day; have 15+ whole eggs a week; drink full fat milk every day; have full fat cheese 5 times a week at least; <strong>use butter to fry things, like bacon<\/strong>&#8230; oh the cholesterol horror! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>Oddly as some may think it though, my cholesterol is fine. In fact it&#8217;s better than fine, it&#8217;s fantastic:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"k6zdZI6LAY\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/06\/my-results-after-4-years-on-a-high-cholesterol-diet-2\/\">My Results After 4 Years on a High Cholesterol Diet<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;My Results After 4 Years on a High Cholesterol Diet&#8221; &#8212; Property Investments, Landlording, CrossFit, Nutrition &amp; Safety\" src=\"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/06\/my-results-after-4-years-on-a-high-cholesterol-diet-2\/embed\/#?secret=0eqEzGzpt9#?secret=k6zdZI6LAY\" data-secret=\"k6zdZI6LAY\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>So it was with some trepidation and some morbid curiosity, I was kind of looking forward to this test. <strong>Here are what the coronary calcium scores mean:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>400+: Extensive atherosclerotic plaque. High likelihood of at least one significant coronary narrowing.<\/li>\n<li>101-400: Definite, at least moderate atherosclerotic plaque. Mild coronary artery disease highly likely. Significant narrowings possible.<\/li>\n<li>11-100: Definite, at least mild atherosclerotic plaque. Mild or minimal coronary narrowings likely.<\/li>\n<li>1-10: Mild identifiable plaque. Risk of coronary artery disease low (&lt;10%)<\/li>\n<li>0: No identifiable plaque. Risk of coronary artery disease very low (&lt;5%)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t really know what I was expecting. I&#8217;d kind of girded myself against bad news and decided that I&#8217;d be ok with anything less than 50. Anything more than that, and I&#8217;d really have to have a long cold think about whether my diet was really such a good choice after all.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">And what would that mean for my family, who at my encouragement, have similar diets to my own? Getting 100+ for example would definitely have <strong>rocked my dietary world<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>So there I was, lying on the CT scanner bed, when the Doctor came back in with my results: <em>&#8220;What was my score Doc?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;You scored zero.&#8221;<\/em> He said with a smile. <em>&#8220;You can go, there&#8217;s nothing to see here.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>ZERO?!? WOOT!!! I hopped off the bed and skipped out of there. I confess in a small dreamlike moment, I had thought it would have been cool to get zero, but didn&#8217;t really give it much credence as a real possibility. I am a realist after all.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">So there you have it. First the cholesterol and now the calcium tests have shown in <strong>my own completely unscientific sample of 1 solitary Colin<\/strong>, a high cholesterol diet DOES NOT cause high blood cholesterol and DOES NOT cause heart disease (when coupled with a low carbohydrate diet of course, as I believe it&#8217;s carbs that are the real cause of heart disease).<\/p>\n<p>Happy days. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For reasons I won&#8217;t bore you with, I was in Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital today for a\u00a0CT Cardiac \/ Coronary Artery Calcium scan (panic not, as you&#8217;ll see, there&#8217;s nothing to worry about). Basically this uses a CT scanner to scan the heart and its arteries to look for calcium deposits. Calcium deposits in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[376,191,375,81,374,378,377,364,127],"class_list":{"0":"post-3296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"category-the-zone-diet","8":"tag-atherosclerosis","9":"tag-carbohydrates","10":"tag-ct-scan","11":"tag-diet","12":"tag-heart","13":"tag-hospital","14":"tag-plaques","15":"tag-the-zone-diet","16":"tag-zone-diet"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3296"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3329,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3296\/revisions\/3329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}