While advances have been made in control of some coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factors, especially smoking and high dietary fat intake, much of the decline in age-adjusted CHD mortality rates has been due to medical treatment and procedural interventions for overt CHD as well as hypertension and hypercholesterolemia. In this context, the availability of an inexpensive, sensitive and specific method for noninvasive detection of both early coronary atherosclerosis and asymptomatic but advanced CHD could allow beneficial treatments to be targeted at many high-risk individuals. The study was designed to determine whether fast-gated helical computed tomography (FGHCT), a more advanced and readily-available variant of a technique (EBCT) that has not achieved its full promise, could play such a role.