alt Hacker NewsI don't see how one can spin this into a positive finding - their preprint says that the only correlate they find with their new measurement is BMI. By my reading, not even male sex is associated with more inflammation. It sounds like they've identified a fancy BMI estimator, and not a very good one.
This is in asymptomatic patients, who already have a great estimator for 10-year heart disease mortality risk in the coronary calcium score which isn't even obliquely mentioned in their abstract. Edit: the paper shows no correlation with calcium, either
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.19.26364786...
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> Men demonstrated higher rates of elevated FAI-Score than women (52.8% vs. 25.8%, p=0.016; ≥90th percentile: 26.4% vs. 3.2%, p=0.007).
I am not saying this is good or interesting science (IIUC this should make us believe that fewer people with coronary inflammation go on to develop heart disease than we would have otherwise thought?) but their score is at least correlated with sex.
CAC scores only show calcified plaque, not vulnerable plaque, which is the sort likely to rupture and cause an event.
You can go get a scan and receive a CAC score of 0, walk away thinking you're perfectly healthy, and then die tomorrow because the scan couldn't detect the massive amounts of non-calcified plaque lining your arteries.
The only non-invasive way to measure vulnerable/soft plaque is via CCTA
See, for example, "Atherosclerotic Plaque in Patients with Zero Calcium Score at Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography"
It measured nearly 1 in 10 patients with a 0 CAC score as having vulnerable plaque:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5967134/