Radiologist sees dual use for colon scans

Scanning a patient's colon for cancerous polyps also offers an opportunity to assess the risk of a heart attack by checking for calcium deposits in the aorta, researchers said on Wednesday.

Radiologists could employ computed tomographic, or CT, scans simultaneously against two leading fatal diseases - colon cancer and heart disease - at little extra cost, Mayo Clinic researcher Jesse Davila said.

"With virtual colonoscopy providing a less invasive approach to diagnosing colon cancer, we wanted to measure whether additional information could be gained during the scan," Davila said in a report presented to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

"We hoped that we could use the scan to measure calcium deposit levels within the aorta and its branching vessels without the need for additional testing," he said.

Virtual colonoscopy uses enhanced X-rays to check for colon cancer instead of threading a tiny camera through the rectum. A medical task force said recently that virtual scans were still not as good as the traditional colonoscopy at spotting smaller precancerous growths and polyps.

Davila reviewed records from 480 patients who received virtual colonoscopy exams at the clinic and found high aortic calcium scores corresponded to heart attacks suffered by nine patients.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths