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Nanotechnology engineering, in association with CT scanning, may be able to detect coronary artery disease at an early stage. How often have you heard the story of a youngish person - usually a man - who's been otherwise well, with no outward signs of heart disease, yet drops down dead of a heart attack? What's often happened is that an area of cholesterol-damaged, coronary artery - what doctors call a plaque - has popped open - ruptured if you like, and suddenly blocked a critical vessel supplying oxygen to heart muscle. Sometimes it isn't out of the blue and there are warning signs but even so, when the coronary arteries are visualized, the blockage doesn't look threatening so the specialist doesn't really know how worried to be. CT scanning has improved enormously and with the injection of material which allows the arteries to be pictured clearly, it's allowing suspect areas to be seen better than ever before. Blockages about to blow can still be missed though but some researchers may have found an easy way of telling by developing a nanotechnology engineered intravenous injection which allows the CT Scan to detect inflammation and the activity of certain white blood cells. In an animal experiment, they could detect blockages whose lids were thinning alarmingly. The next step is to see whether it applies in humans.
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