Heart stress test results | Do You Need A stress Test ?

 When I asked my new patient Steve why he came to see me, he replied, "I think I need a stress test."

heart stress test results had heart symptoms. No chest pain or shortness of breath. At 72, he is still training with gusto and feels great.

However, he was worried about heart disease. Several family members, including his father, had heart attacks in their 50s, so Steve has been taking regular stress tests for the past 20 years to "make sure everything is okay."

Steve was initially surprised when I told him I didn't think he needed a stress test (or any heart test for that matter). But after I explained to him what a stress test could and couldn't determine, he happily skipped it.

What is a stress test?

The most common type of exercise test is performed by having the patient walk on a treadmill (less often, on a bicycle). In this test, the load (incline and treadmill speed) is increased until the patient is unable to continue due to exhaustion or experiences signs or symptoms of anxiety such as very high blood pressure or life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. Before, during and after the stress test, the patient's electrocardiogram (ECG), blood pressure and symptoms are continuously monitored.

Stress tests tell us how well blood is flowing to the heart. If a patient can take an exercise test in just a few minutes and has chest pain and medical heart in Alberta cardiology, it may mean their arteries are blocked, putting them at high risk of heart attack. incident.

Why not do a stress test?

It is common to perform routine or even yearly stress tests on patients who have no symptoms. The idea is that a heart attack can happen suddenly and without warning, so it makes sense to check for unexpected heart conditions to avoid future problems. However, regular exercise testing has not been shown to reduce the incidence of heart attack or death. There are many reasons for this:

A heart attack usually occurs as a result of the rupture of an arterial plaque that does not block blood flow until it ruptures and is therefore not detected by a stress test. Every cardiologist knows of examples of patients who had a heart attack within months of a normal stress test. ECG Testing in Edmonton mean the stress test is wrong. A stress test cannot detect a blockage in an artery unless it stops blood flow to the heart muscle, which usually occurs when the blockage is 70% or more.

There is no evidence that identifying and correcting asymptomatic arterial occlusion, even if the occlusion is greater than 70%, reduces the risk of future heart attack or cardiac death. This came as a surprise to many and is worth repeating. Opening arteries with stents in acute stress test heart, but opening arteries with stable blockages (as found in exercise tests) has NOT been shown to reduce death or heart attacks.