TORRANCE, CA — The insights provided by coronary CT angiography (CCTA) are similar to what is available from quantitative coronary angiography (QCA), suggests a prospective comparative study that gave CCTA the edge because it's also noninvasive and offers some other advantages over radiographic angiography[1].
The study is described as "the first prospective, head-to-head multicenter comparison" of CCTA and QCA against what was taken as the gold standard, invasive measurement of fractional flow reserve (FFR).
The follow-up analysis of the previously published DeFACTO trial suggests that "CTA may be used as an alternative to assess luminal stenosis and to serve as gatekeeper to FFR measurements in patients presenting with chest-pain syndromes," according to the report published February 17, 2016 in JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging.
"Clearly, invasive angiography is going to be the way we are going to fix lesions when people need a stent," lead author Dr Matthew J Budoff (Los Angeles Biomedical Research Center, Torrance, CA) told heartwire from Medscape. "But when you are talking about diagnosis, especially in a stable patent where there is no urgency, CCTA offers a lot of advantages in that we can see plaque, we can see if there's been an infarction, we can see other structures like atrial-septal defects or other structures beyond the coronary arteries, including the pulmonary arteries, so we can look for
