Don’t stress these 3 stress test options | Dr. Sunrinder Khinda

 If you're just feeling stressed, that's no reason to take a stress test.

Edmonton South  Medical Facilities have chest pain or tightness, shortness of breath, or other possible warning signs of a heart attack or angina, talk to your doctor. This may be a sign that a stress test, a stress echocardiogram known as a stress echo, or a stress perfusion test can help your doctor diagnose a possible medical condition.

Three stress tests

Stress Test: Measures the effect exercise has on your heart.

Stress echocardiography: An ultrasound scan that shows how well your heart muscle is working to pump blood around your body.

Stress Perfusion Study: Nuclear markers are used to assess blood flow to the heart.

Stress Test Limits

These tests are very important work for heart screening, but they have limitations.

Stress tests have been around for decades and are very helpful in determining whether a patient's symptoms stem from a severely blocked coronary artery, more than 70 percent. While stress tests are generally accurate, they can sometimes be misleading.

They can give results that are ultimately false positives, which does not need to worry the patient about coronary artery disease. On the other hand, they can give false negatives and give the patient a false sense of security.

Next step: angiography

After stress tests reveal abnormalities, cardiologists turn to a more invasive but also much more informative test, cardiac catheterization with medical heart in Alberta cardiology.

A long thin tube called a catheter flows through the blood vessels to the heart. With the help of special colors, doctors can see the blockage precisely. People who are having a heart attack often have one or more arteries with large or even complete blockages.

"The message from taking it is that it's very important to do the right thing for the right patient at the right time," heart stress test results “When we are wrong, it is usually because of the ordering side of the test which may not be convincing. The last thing we wanted to do was ignore the results just because we thought they were false positives, and then two months later the patient had a heart attack.

Many people can make lifestyle changes to reduce the need for most, if not all, of these tests.