Hundreds of cases of serious heart disease are being missed every year by the NHS, which is putting thousands more through needless tests which waste around £40 million a year, a leading expert has warned. The current tests used to identify people at risk of a major heart attack, because their blood vessels are dangerously narrowed, are inadequate, costly and even risky, Prof Avijit Lahiri,Hundreds of cases of serious heart disease are being missed every year by the NHS, which is putting thousands more through needless tests which waste around £40 million a year, a leading expert has warned.
The current tests used to identify people at risk of a major heart attack, because their blood vessels are dangerously narrowed, are inadequate, costly and even risky, Prof Avijit Lahiri, of the Wellington Hospital in London said. Patients with chest pain are referred for initial tests and then sent for an angiogram which involves injecting dye into the veins and then taking a series of x-rays to find narrowing.
However around 40 per cent of the angiograms show nothing meaning the patient was put through the £1,000 procedure for nothing. On top of this, an estimated one in 10 of those with chest pain perform well on the initial tests and are discharged but are in fact suffering from arteries which are up to 90 per cent blocked.
He is now carrying out a trial of 1,000 patients who will be randomly assigned to receive either the normal NHS care or be sent to the Wellington to receive CT scans.
He said:
The use of imaging is abysmal in this country in comparison to the rest of the world. It is not uncommon for the NHS to turn patients away and them drop dead of a heart attack. It is the whole system. We are dinosaurs. I believe using CT scans can reduce the number of unnecessary angiograms, which are too invasive. We have got the radiation dose down to the minimum possible with our CT and at £400 a go, it is also cheaper than an angiogram.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “New research into the place of these newer imaging techniques is always welcome and helps to inform future recommendations made by Department of Health and other organisations, such as NICE."
See latest plain English article on heart scans – Chest Pain – Cardiac or not?
