If you’re like me, the last thing you want to hear is that you have to delay, or worse – skip – your morning cup(s) of coffee.
This is, unfortunately, a fairly frequent necessity in medicine. Whether you’re about to get blood work drawn, have a coronary artery calcium score CT scan, or undergo surgery, you likely have to fast or avoid caffeine prior to your procedure.
While you don’t have to fast before a coronary calcium scan, you do have to avoid caffeine since caffeine consumption can negatively impact the quality of your coronary calcium scan.
Why? Because caffeine is a stimulant that can increase your heart rate (how fast your heart beats) and a CT scanner is essentially a camera taking pictures of the heart.
If your heart beats too fast, the CT scanner won’t be able to take quality pictures to see (and count) the calcium deposits on the coronary arteries. This frequently results in motion artifacts (such as blurring or doubling in the image), which can lead to a nondiagnostic exam or an inaccurate score with over- or underestimation of the true amount of coronary artery calcification.
An inaccurate calcium score can erroneously place a person into the wrong risk category and give a false risk assessment for coronary heart disease.
For more background information and a deeper dive into a coronary calcium scan, coronary artery disease, and the meaning of a coronary calcium score, keep reading 🙂