Welcome to Dr. Caren and Dr. Urman's Heart Health e-Newsletter

We hope you find this complimentary monthly educational service for our patients and their families helpful. Please click on the header above or here to enter our website and learn more about our practice. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or wish to make an appointment.  

The column on the right has heart-related stories from the last several weeks which we feel are most important and most likely to be of interest to our patients.  Additional general information and recent news about our office can also be found to the right. The latest news items from the last week about heart health are found below under "Health News."


Introducing Atherosclerosis Screening at our office

Carotid IMT (intima-media thickness) ultrasound allows your physician to find the earliest signs of plaque buildup in arteries (atherosclerosis).  Atherosclerosis is the process that ultimately
can lead to heart attacks and strokes.  Using an easy, quick and painless ultrasound technique, the earliest signs of hidden plaque buildup (first seen as increased thickness of the artery wall) can be recognized.  Much more sensitive than regular carotid ultrasound vascular imaging, this special technique, Carotid IMT, has been shown to correlate with future risk of stroke and heart attack.

COR Medical Group, the offices of Drs. Jeffrey Caren and Mark Urman, is the first private medical office in not only the Greater Los Angeles area but actually in all of California (and one of the first private offices in the US) offering CardioHealth^®, the latest technology to find the earliest signs atherosclerosis.  The CardioHealth^® technology is the result of well-validated standardization of the Carotid IMT technique which itself has been around for several years but up until now had not gained widespread use due to difficulty with reliable, reproducible and accurate imaging technique and interpretation (except in a handful of very experienced research centers nationwide).  However, the technology behind CardioHealth^® has overcome these obstacles to allow routine reliable and accurate clinical testing which is why Drs. Caren and Urman are among the first to have adopted it in their practice for their patients.

It is important to discuss with your cardiologist if you are an appropriate candidate for Carotid IMT imaging.  Unlike CAT scans of the heart, there is no radiation exposure and testing takes just a matter of minutes.  Results of the carotid IMT ultrasound imaging study and a full CardioHealth® Report including your risk factors for cardiovascular disease are available soon thereafter.

“You are as old as your arteries.”

-Attributed to Physician Sir William Osler (known as the “father of modern medicine”), early 20th century