Are you thinking of getting a calcium scoring of your heart to see if you have dangerous levels of calcified plaque in your arteries?
This 15 minute procedure can show the amount of buildup in coronary arteries.
A Northwestern Medicine study suggests the test may be most helpful for people whose risk is not already clearly low or high.
Researchers followed more than 6,000 adults for a decade. Adding a coronary artery calcium score to the American Heart Association’s PREVENT risk calculator produced only a modest improvement across the entire group.
PREVENT estimates cardiovascular risk using information such as age, sex, blood pressure and cholesterol. It can estimate risk over 10 or 30 years.
A calcium scan looks for calcified plaque directly in the coronary arteries. The amount found is converted into a calcium score.
Higher scores generally mean a greater likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease in the future.
The score was more useful when PREVENT put someone into a borderline or intermediate-risk category.
In those cases, the scan could help show whether actual risk was higher or lower than the initial estimate suggested.
Why a Calcium Scan Isn’t for Everyone
The paper says that the growing availability and lower cost of these scans doesn’t mean everyone should get one.
For people already considered low risk, scanning can add radiation exposure, testing and expense without a clear benefit.
People in the high-risk group may be advised to take a statin regardless of their calcium score.
The study was published Aug. 26, 2026, in JAMA.
What the Study Found
The researchers used data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, which included adults 45 to 79.
Each participant had a calcium score and a PREVENT estimate at the start.
Those predictions were compared with actual cardiovascular events during the following 10 years.
About 6% of participants experienced a heart attack or stroke.
Overall, adding calcium information barely changed how well the model separated people who did and did not have a cardiovascular event.
The score increased from 0.73 with PREVENT alone to 0.75 after calcium was added.
The results were more notable among people initially classified as having borderline or intermediate risk, defined as a 3% to 9% chance of heart disease within 10 years.
For these patients, the calcium score offered more useful information about future cardiovascular risk.
How Calcium Scores Could Guide Treatment
Knowing the calcium score may help doctors decide whether someone near a treatment threshold should consider preventive therapy.
That can be useful when deciding about statins, which lower cholesterol and can reduce cardiovascular risk.
For now, the findings suggest coronary artery calcium scans may be most useful when a person’s initial risk estimate leaves some uncertainty, rather than as a routine test for everyone.
