Routine Heart CT: AI Reads Death Risk From Fat and Muscle
Graded Preliminary — a look back at 28,509 heart patients, checked at outside clinics; a preprint not yet peer reviewed, with no proof that changing body composition changes risk.
- Design
- Retrospective cohort study
- Participants
- 28,509
- Duration
- 3.5 years
- Funding
- National Institutes of Health (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; NIBIB)
A routine chest CT in heart patients can yield a single score that estimates their risk of dying well.
Many heart patients already get a low-dose CT image of the chest during a standard test. A computer program read bone, muscle and four kinds of fat tissue from these images. Combined with age, sex, BMI and calcium in the heart arteries, this produced a single score. People in the highest score group had about 17 times the risk of dying of those in the lowest group.
Researchers looked back at data from 28,509 people with known or suspected narrowing of the heart arteries. Over a typical three and a half years, 16 percent of them died. The program was then tested at clinics that had no part in building it. There it predicted deaths better than a simple model using only age, sex, BMI and artery calcium. The strongest signal was how dense the fat around the inner organs looked on the scan, followed by how much muscle people had.
The paper is a preprint that independent experts have not yet reviewed. It used existing records and included only heart patients. It also measured just one section of the chest, not the whole body. Whether changing fat and muscle actually lowers risk is not shown: that was only tested in computer simulations.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure: Several authors hold equity in APQ Health, receive software royalties, or have consulting fees and grants from companies such as GE Healthcare, Siemens and Pfizer.
Disclaimer: Research summaries are provided for informational purposes only and do not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health routine.