Cholesterol

Advertisement Thanks to a gift certificate for a heart scan she bought at a school fund-raiser and left tucked in a drawer for five months, Goldstein recently learned otherwise - and she believes it saved her life.

While training for the New York Marathon, she dusted off the coupon, went in for her scan, and discovered that her presumably healthy arteries were actually so clogged with calcified plaque that only 3 percent of women her age scored worse.

She went on medication and kept training anyway, but this time she took care to wear a heart rate monitor, limit her hill climbing, and not push too hard.

Three days after the race, further tests confirmed she had a 95-percent blockage in a major artery, and she underwent surgery to open it.

"The cardiologist said he was surprised I didn't drop dead of a heart attack on the course," says Goldstein, who credits the scan for motivating her to "train smarter." "If I hadn't had that heart scan, I don't think I would have even made it to the marathon." Twelve years after the ultrafast Computed Tomography (CT) scan began to emerge at high-end, direct-to-consumer medical boutiq...

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