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Don't wait for a heart attack to find out you have heart disease John “Butch” Howard of Charleston has every reason to be concerned about his heart. His grandmother, his grandfather and other members of his immediate family died of heart disease in their sixties and seventies. On top of that, a good friend of his, who, like he, had no symptoms of heart disease, suffered a heart attack while they were playing racketball together. Now he, too, is in his sixties. And while he has no symptoms of heart problems, he said, “I wanted to find out if I had a blockage in my heart without having a heart attack first.” It’s a good thing he did. Howard  heard about a screening procedure available at the Medical University of South Carolina called Cardiac Scoring, in which an ultrafast medical imaging scanner quickly assesses how much calcium is present in the heart. High levels of calcium consistently indicate at least a single blockage in a major heart artery. Blockages cause heart attacks. Howard contacted MUSC by calling Health Connection at 792-1414 (or 1-800-424-MUSC) and was quickly scheduled for cardiac scoring. “The test is simple and painless,” he said. “I didn’t even have to take off my shirt.” The patient, in street clothes, lies on a table that slides through a scanning device that looks like a large donut. The scanner records information into a computer. The entire process only takes two minutes. Zero is a perfect score. The benchmark number that would indicate that problems might exist is 400. Butch’s score was 1,180, putting him in the high-risk category. His doctor recommended surgery. Two weeks later, Butch had a catheter procedure and a stent placed in his blocked artery, a procedure that didn’t require open-heart surgery. The artery was 95 percent blocked. “The fact is, I was a walking time bomb and didn’t even know it,” he said. Butch went in for the heart procedure on a Monday and was back at work by Wednesday. He’s made some lifestyle changes and altered his diet. “The beauty of this test lies in its simplicity,” said J. Bayne Selby Jr., M.D., an MUSC vascular radiologist. “It is one of the easiest tests in the field of medical imaging that I have seen in the last 20 years.” Cardiac scoring had its beginnings in the United States about 10 years ago. Only recently has the conventional CT equipment become faster and more accurate. MUSC has one of these new Ultrafast Helical CT scanners and is the first center in South Carolina to offer this relatively inexpensive test. Heart Risk Health Self-Assessment If you want to find out if you’re at risk for heart disease, conduct a self-assessment by logging on to <http://MUSChealth.com>. You will be guided to answer questions that will help determine whether you’re at risk for congestive heart failure, heart disease or a heart attack. The “Heart Disease Quiz” asks 12 questions concerning age, weight, family history of heart disease, smoking, exercise, eating habits, blood pressure and cholesterol.  It only takes a few minutes to complete and when you’re done the computer will calculate your risk of heart dis