MRI is the best way to diagnose high risk patients with cardiac chest pain, according to a five-year-long British research project reported today.
Researchers at Leeds University studied outcomes for some 750 patients, comparing scanning with MRI with the results of the SPECT procedure.
Reporting in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they say that cardiac MRI proved the best procedure to predict serious cardiovascular events.
They conclude it is the "safest and most effective" way to identify high risk patients with cardiac chest pain.
Researcher Professor John Greenwood said: “The outcomes of this study could lead to changes in clinical guidelines and to the way doctors investigate chest pain due to suspected heart disease.
“Although SPECT is currently more widely available than MRI, the use of MRI across a wide spectrum of diseases means that it will be much more readily available for heart disease investigation in coming years.
“The benefits of cardiac MRI are not limited to reducing exposure to ionising radiation.
"The non-invasive cardiac MRI test, which is not only more diagnostically accurate and cost effective for the NHS than SPECT, is also potentially better at forecasting the outcome of the disease."
* A second study reported over the weekend reveals the success of a technique aimed at improving cardiac magnetic resonance imaging by reducing patient breathing.
Doctors at the University Hospital Lausanne, Switzerland, have been testing a technique called high frequency percussive ventilation.
Patients breath through a ventilator mask that delivers air in small quantities hundreds of times a minute, reducing the need to breathe.
So far two people have tested the procedure, the EuroCMR conference of the European Society of Cardiology heard.
Annals of Internal Medicine 16 May 2016
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