ACT Trial

The current method of identifying individuals at high risk of cardiovascular disease is not very precise. It turns out that a simple and inexpensive scan of the heart can very well determine which of these allegedly high-risk individuals will ultimately NOT develop cardiovascular disease. Previous research showed that 1/3 of these allegedly high-risk individuals had no signs of cardiovascular disease after the scan and thus actually classified them as low-risk.

Another study of 10,000 individuals showed that those who did not signs of cardiovascular disease on the CT scan had less than a 1% chance of having a heart attack per year, independent of any risk factors they had such as smoking, high blood pressure and/or diabetes. In persons without signs of cardiovascular disease on the CT scan, the cholesterol-lowering medication can therefore safely be stopped for 5 years.

In addition, the AMC has now developed a method to assess this CT scan fully automatically, which reduces the costs many times over. come to lie. We would therefore like to argue in favor of having a heart scan of all allegedly high-risk persons, which will result in stopping or not starting the cholesterol-lowering medication in 1/3 of these persons and thus a considerable saving for health care will deliver.