Lesson 2
4. Approaches
to Prevention of PCM
A very wise man once told me that there are two kinds
of people, those who divide things into two groups and those who
don't. I think there are also people who calculate risk with little
tables and parameters, and then there are the rest of us who just
get a gestalt of the patient, and then say, "Woah! High risk."
For those of you who don't want to guess, there are a number of
expensive non-routine tests that can tell you who has coronary artery
disease. These include exercise stress testing, radionuclide venticulography,
Holter, stress echocardiography, coronary angiograms, and thallium
scintigraphy. These tests are usually designed and validated to
identify who has significant coronary artery disease. They don't
usually indicate who is going to have an MI with their operation.
They don't tell you if the plaque in the coronary recently fractured,
or is highly thrombogenic. They tell you who is going to have a
positive coronary angiogram, which is not what you really need to
know.
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Approaches to Prevention of PCM
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