A new study shows Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) predicts stroke in both men and women and is more accurate in persons younger than 65 years than in older individuals. Lead investigator, Dirk M. Hermann, MD (University Hospital Essen, Germany), stated that, "When a patient stands in front of us we can find out about their risk factors such as diabetes, blood pressure et c., but we don't know much about their extent of vascular disease. We know that CAC is a good predictor of myocardial infarction, but we wanted to know if it is a good predictor of stroke as well, and we found that it was. This study shows that the risks go together. If a patient is at risk of MI, they are also at risk for stroke. We now have a test that can tell us if a patient is at risk of 2 very common conditions." "CAC, as we now have shown, is able to predict stroke events independent of established risk factors, making this marker promising for risk stratification not only in the hands of cardiologists but also in the hands of neurologists," the authors conclude.

For the current study, 4180 persons aged 45 to 75 years from the population-based Heinz Nixdorf Recall study without previous stroke, coronary heart disease or myocardial infarction, were evaluated for stroke events over an average 94 months. Cox proportional hazards regressions were used to examine CAC as a stroke predictor in addition to established vascular risk factors (age, sex, systolic blood pressure, low-density lipoprotein, high-density lipoprotein, diabetes mellitus, smoking, and arterial fibrillation). During the follow-up period, 92 incident strokes occurred (82 ischemic and 10 hemorrhagic). Patients who sustained a stroke had significantly higher CAC values at baseline (median, 104.8) than those without stroke (11.2).