Listen to Listen to your heart — it might be trying to tell you more than you think.
A new study found that your score on a key cardiovascular test may indicate your risk of dying in the coming years — even from causes unrelated to your heart.
Presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2025 on Saturday, the findings suggest the scan could offer a window into your overall health, not just what’s beating in your chest.
In the large study, researchers at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City dug into the medical records of 40,018 patients whose doctors flagged them as at risk for heart disease.
As part of their care, every patient underwent a PET/CT stress test, which gauges how well your heart is getting blood.
A major focus of the test is measuring the amount of calcium-laden plaque in the coronary arteries.
When plaque builds up, blood flow to the heart can get blocked. Plaque rupture can also trigger coronary thrombosis, completely stopping blood flow and leading to serious problems like a heart attack.
If someone has a coronary artery calcium (CAC) score of zero, their arteries are likely clear of advanced plaques. If CAC is present, the risk of a future heart attack rises with the score.
Of the patients studied, the researchers found that 7,967 had no calcium, while 32,051 had some level of CAC.
The team followed these patients for five years, tracking all-cause deaths. They found that people with any CAC were 2 to 3 times more likely to die than those who had no coronary artery calcium.
Even more surprising, only about a quarter of these deaths were from cardiovascular disease — meaning most of the patients died from causes unrelated to the heart.
“Someone’s coronary artery calcium score could be a more powerful predictor of a person’s overall health than we previously thought,” Dr. Jeffrey L. Anderson, principal investigator of the study, said in a press release.
Researchers aren’t exactly sure why patients with coronary artery calcium had higher all-cause mortality.
Anderson suggested that plaque in the heart might mirror plaque buildup elsewhere in the body.
That can lead to serious problems like organ damage, peripheral artery disease in the arms or legs, or carotid artery disease in the neck, which can trigger a stroke.
Atherosclerosis — the gradual hardening of arteries from plaque — could also interfere with immune surveillance, a crucial defense against cancer and other illnesses.
To dig deeper, researchers plan to study the participants who died of non-heart-related causes to better understand the link between CAC scores and all-cause mortality.
“This may help uncover the mechanism of why a coronary artery calcium score predicts death due to non-coronary artery problems,” Anderson said.
“It’s not clear to us right now, and it requires more study, but it’s a very interesting observation and suggests that coronary artery calcium has prognostic value beyond just heart attacks and other heart-related causes,” he added.
That’s notable, because the scan used to measure CAC score is already widely available in outpatient settings. It’s non-invasive, takes about 10 minutes to complete and requires no special preparation.
If researchers can better understand the link, CAC scores could one day help doctors do more than just predict heart attack risk. They could become part of a broader tool to gauge a person’s overall health.
By spotting patients at higher risk of dying earlier, doctors could step in sooner — potentially improving outcomes and extending lives.
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