Using FAI in clinical practice improves risk stratification and outcomes
Before the clinical manifestations of atherosclerosis become apparent, patient management in primary prevention is based on the control of traditional risk factors (lipids, glucose, blood pressure) and lifestyle education (diet, exercise, smoking cessation).
In secondary prevention, the focus shifts towards symptom relief and the use of non-invasive testing to guide management.
Adapted from Antoniades - Imaging residual inflammatory cardiovascular risk – EHJ 2019
However, over half of acute coronary syndromes occur in patients in whom current diagnostic testing did not reveal evidence of ischemia or a functionally significant coronary artery stenosis.
A CaRi-Heart® report provides comprehensive patient risk stratification for future cardiac events, including:
The patient’s relative risk of a fatal cardiac event, compared with people of the same age and gender, based on quantification of the coronary inflammation (FAI-Score)
The absolute risk of a fatal cardiac event within the next 8 years, based on the personalised FAI-Score values, the coronary atherosclerotic plaque burden and clinical risk factors
The CaRi-Heart® analysis significantly improves risk discrimination over clinical risk factor-based models across the full spectrum of cardiac risk. One way to seamlessly integrate it into patient management pathways involving CCTA is outlined below:
Compared with Calcium score, CaRi-Heart® has superior prognostic performance
and tracks dynamic changes in response to treatment