Educating patients on CT results increases adherence, reduces chest pain
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Providing brief education to patients on CT results leads to patient adherence and reduces the future likelihood of noncardiac chest pain, researchers reported.
The findings were presented at the virtual European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging – Best of Imaging 2020.
“Previous studies have reported that these patients do not trust their examination results and still think they have heart disease,” Isabel Krohn, MSc, radiographer at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, said in a press release. “I noticed that a number of patients who came for a coronary CT to diagnose their chest pain had previously undergone a coronary CT scan and other heart examinations, which found no evidence of coronary disease. Given the excellent prognostic value of coronary CT, I thought this information could be beneficial to this patient group.”
Researchers enrolled 92 patients (mean age, 51 years; 68% women) with chest pain and normal CT findings. Patients were randomly assigned to an intervention group, which received an explanation of their CT findings such as the reliability of the results and their prognostic value, or a control group, which received standard care not involving CT result information.
After 1 month, participants were asked to rate the degree of which they believed the CT scan of their coronary arteries had found no heart disease on a scale of 0 to 10. Participants were also administered the Seattle Angina Questionnaire to respond how often they were currently experiencing chest pain during strenuous levels of activity compared with before the intervention period.
According to the researchers, patients in the intervention group were more likely to believe the CT results (P = .016) and 67% of patients in the intervention group reported experiencing chest pain much less often compared with only 38% in the control group (P = .042).
According to the press release, researchers said they believe that explaining information in CT brochures and imaging aid the patient in understanding their results and discussing results with the patient immediately after the test helped the patient accept their results.
“This type of education is likely to become more common in years to come as a way of improving health literacy,” Krohn said in the release.
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Krohn I, et al. Abstract 90641. Presented at: EACVI - Best of Imaging 2020; Dec. 11-12, 2020 (virtual meeting).
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