This particular study looked at inflammation through imaging (CT scans) as part of Biograph's $17,500 program. You can get at the underlying signal fairly cheaply through a simple blood test (hs-CRP).

It's fairly well-known that inflammation is an independent risk factor for heart disease, alongside LDL cholesterol (or ApoB) and blood pressure: https://www.empirical.health/blog/inflammation-and-heart-hea...

The American College of Cardiology looked at a bunch of inflammation biomarkers and standardized on hs-CRP: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2025.08.047

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jp57 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From the article:

Importantly, routine bloodwork and clinical tools – including ... hs-CRP [among other tests] ... – showed no correlation with the presence of coronary inflammation and failed to identify which patients had inflamed arteries.

	▲	brandonb 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is one of the things that makes me a little skeptical of their score. If it's accurate, there should be a positive correlation with known biomarkers. (I see you made a similar observation elsewhere.) In their paper they actually find an inverse correlation with hs-CRP, which disappeared when removing two patients who were sick. So I wonder if the sample size being small is partly driving this.
	▲	phoronixrly 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is this a positive thing? I read it as the AI results not correlating with test data...

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yokaze 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe you didn't get then the latest news: https://www.tctmd.com/news/zeus-trial-ziltivekimab-fails-red...

Inflammation is likely a marker, but not the cause of heart failures. That doesn't contradict it being an independent risk factor, but up to recently, it was assumed be causal driver.

	▲	brandonb 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Same thing happened with the Lp(a) drugs recently. Practically speaking, statins reduce LDL cholesterol (~50% at the strongest dose) and hs-CRP (~37%) and have cardiovascular outcomes data, so that's likely the route a patient would go based on the medications that are approved today.