Heart Attacks Now Predictable

Certain things in life comes when we have the patience to wait for the right time. That same thing holds true in medical science and technology. Where cardiac events had been known for its bad reputation as a "thief in the night," right now it can be predicted with sensible accuracy.

THE recent wave of science and technology developments in medicine, particularly in Japan, gave rise to a better way of predicting deadly turns in coronary artery disease (CAD).

As of 2006, CAD is the leading cause of death in Taiwan. And the disease results from degenerative stiffening of blood vessels in the body, called atherosclerosis.

During the later part of the 20th century, Japan came up with a technology that measures the stiffness of arteries using pulse wave velocity (PWV). The basic scientific principles of PWV through the arterial tree dates back to 1808 when Thomas Young started investigating it.

As early as 1998, carotid-femoral PWV (cfPWV), the use of PWV in assessing the level of stiffness in the carotid and femoral arteries, is widely accepted as the gold standard in predicting atherosclerosis in heart arteries. By 1999, it became a well-known predictor of death resulting from cardiovascular events. In the 2000s, it became a marker of vascular damage. Last year, the Tomiyama study in Japan used the technology to establish an atherosclerosis index, called carotid-femoral index (CFI).

The only limit found so far was its inability to assess arteries found in the inguinal area.

So as early as 2002, manufacturers started finding ways to meet this need, and devised a machine that the PWV technology use in assessing arterial stiffness in the brachial artery around ankle area, a variation later named as brachial-ankle PWV (baPWV). The Xu study in 2008 confirmed its predictive strength when... [READ MORE]

This article appeared in SunStar Cebu on 04 January 2012.

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