Heart scan curiosities 2

9. December 2006 William Davis (2)


This is an example of a so-called "hiatal hernia", meaning the stomach has migrated through the diaphragmatic hiatus into the chest--the stomach is literally in the chest. This example is an unusually large one. Hiatal hernias can cause chest pain, indigestion, and a variety of other gastrointestinal complaints. Heart scans are reasonably useful to screen for this disorder, though very small ones could escape detection by this method.

Sometimes, you can actually hear the gurgling of stomach contents (the common "growling" stomach) by listening to the chest. Large ones like this actually crowd your heart (the gray structure above the circled hernia), irritating it and even causing abnormal rhythm disorders. The dense dark material within the hernia represents lunch.

I would not advocate CT heart scans as a principal method to make a diagnosis, but sometimes it just pops up during a heart scan and we pass it on to the person scanned.
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Comments (2) -

  • Anonymous

    8/2/2007 5:42:00 PM |

    Awesome, just awesome.Brilliant blog that has helped me ALOT so I am eternally grateful. Phil

  • Anonymous

    10/4/2007 2:01:00 AM |

    I just had a heart scan. 44 year old female with family history of heart disease.  Both parents in 40's with heart attacks/by-pass surgery...My cardiologist ask if I had ever been diagnosed with a hiatal hernia and the scan looked somewhat like the one you show.  It looked like I had one Big Heart!  He told me to follow-up with my PCP.  I did, he is new for me and not sure I see eye-to-eye with him, but he insist a hernia can not show up on a heart scan, I told him, I saw it, I saw the scan, I saw the white circle...I have had GERD for 5-6 years now, nausea almost every morning on top of the reflux in the morning and my family always complain how long it takes me to eat! Guess what, I'm having an upper GI in the morning.  Thanks for this information...I thought maybe I was loosing my mind!

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Fly to India for a bypass operation?

Fly to India for a bypass operation?

16. June 2006 William Davis (1)

In the June 19, 2006 issue of People Magazine, there's an article called "The Doctor is in . . .INDIA". The report talks about how, with health care costs in the U.S. spiralling out of control, more and more Americans are leaving the country to have their procedure performed.

They tell the story of Mr. Carlo Gislimberti of New Mexico and cite these numbers:

Heart Surgery
Cost in U.S.: $200,000

Cost in India: $10,000

Mr. Gislimberti opted to have his coronary bypass operation in India for cost reasons.

But the People magazine report left out one other option: The Track Your Plaque program: $39.00

Do your part to save ballooning health care costs: Engage in a truly powerful program of heart disease prevention like the Track Your Plaque program. The cost difference is laughably huge. And you won't require a 12-inch chest incision.

Follow conventional guidelines and guess what? You're going to have a heart attack. Follow the American Heart Association diet and you'll have heart disease.

Cut to the chase. The only program that is able to detect, track, and control coronary plaque better than any other process I know of is this program.

Note: I am not proposing that a heart disease prevention program like Track Your Plaque can replace a procedure like coronary bypass when a dangerous situation has developed. The Track Your Plaque program is designed to be implemented in the years before heart surgery is required. That's when you have the greatest control over your fate.
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  • Hjertecenter Varde

    10/26/2009 12:49:29 PM |

    Wow, flying to india - yaerh its cheap - but what about the quality?

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