My Christmas present this year was receiving the news that my calcium score was 1444 on a routine screen at age 63.

I am actually MAD about getting the score. I was a consulting bio-electrical engineer to NASA a million years ago, and my first gig there was in instrumenting the cardiovascular lab. A lot of the instrumentation that is used for telemetry in hospitals today we built up from parts. I mention this because often times parts lie.

Here is an interesting paper done on calcium scores back in 2017 demonstrating a 50% error rate on some CT systems caused by a heart rate of 75bpm.

Sorry---they will not let me post the URL yet, so I will amend when I get permission, but the title is: Influence of heart rate on coronary calcium scores: a multi-manufacturer phantom study. And it was in the International Journal of Cardiology, 28 Dec 2017.

I dont know about you, but my heart rate was well over 110bpm going into the CT scanner tube. Yet the doctors keep telling me that the machine is 100% accurate with the score. When I provide them with the paper, they look confused, then angry at my mention.

So now I have to do the complete stupid human trick to prove to my doctors that I am 100%. Like many of you, I can imagine when we get to the end of this that the calcium score will have been caused by a secondary occurrence, not inter vascular. In the interim, I am left with the upset of thinking I have a time-bomb in my chest, instead of a heart. Since the news, I am throwing PVCs like crazy, and getting anxiety attacks that should be laughable.

I should mention that I gave up red meat five years ago, am not obese, exercise regularly, and have no family history of heart disease at all.

I am not angry that there is a CT calcium scan test. I am angry that doctors believe these high values like a religion, when to me it seems like an anomaly with the technology as many of you have found out the hard way. When will some one do a meaningful study to show that these super high scores should be viewed with suspicion?

And I remember when gastroenterologists would not accept that H-pylori caused stomach ulcers---complete nonsense! So now, I guess it is cardiology's turn. I think the CT makers are way over stepping what is feasible.

Pete