Innovations in Heart Care

It's very easy to identify a person who's having a heart attack, but it's very hard to treat the underlying disease.

So my name is Matthew Budoff. I'm a professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine and an Endowed Chair of Preventive Cardiology.

My focus has been on cardiac imaging and trying to identify patients early in the process of heart disease so that we can start treatments earlier and hopefully have better outcomes.

So I think atherosclerosis detection is actually the largest growing trend that we've seen in really identifying people at a much earlier stage in heart disease. For so long we've waited for patients to present with a heart attack and then try to treat them.

Early detection, early treatment. We started with coronary calcium scores, and now because of lower radiation and better tools to read the studies, we're now using CT angiography in primary prevention to try to identify those people at risk.

I really think the next paradigm shift will be tracking atherosclerosis over time and using that as the metric to adjust treatment. So, we can look at putting a patient on a statin and saying “oh, your LDL is well controlled.” And that's fine, LDL is a blood marker, but it has nothing to do with the disease itself. And there are many patients whose LDL is well controlled and their disease is still out of control. So instead of just looking at a surrogate marker we can literally personalize our treatment based on the changes in plaque over time. So we'll get an AI test, we’ll get a Cleerly tested at baseline. We’ll put them on whatever treatments we think are appropriate. We'll get another test at 1 to 2 years, see if that treatment is stopping or reversing atherosclerosis. And if not layer in more therapy for that individual. If it is working, it's all good.